Cogs and Ink

Red Reading Light

2015-05-15T00:40:00.000-07:00

As a child, I discovered that covering my torch with a piece of thin red paper would make it less likely that my parents would notice I was staying up late to read in bed. Later, at boarding school, I found the same trick enabled me to share a dormitory without being assaulted for disturbing my roommates' sleep. These days I only share a room with my wife, but I still like to read at night. Of course, technology has moved on since I were a lad, and back-lit Kindles and ebooks on smartphones now exist, but I've found these to be a threefold disappointment: not only are they quite capable of disturbing a nearly-sleeping partner, even on their lowest brightness or 'night mode', but they ruin one's night vision, and, according to the WHO, their blue/white light can make it harder to fall asleep. The only torch I own these days is a one-million-candlepower monster I use for finding lost cats; not really something I can take to bed, even if I ignore the fire hazard inherent in covering its glare.

My solution was to make an Android app; after firing up Eclipse, discovering that there was now a dedicated IDE in the form of Android Studio, installing that instead, and laughing at the way I could create a working app by pressing only the tab key, I put together a very simple little thing that displays a red light on the screen of your device. Swipe along one axis to change brightness; swipe along the other to change hue. I added the option to change hue after testing it on an old device I had lying around and finding that even on maximum brightness its primitive screen was too dim to read by when a pure red - introducing a little more white to the mix solved the problem. Currently the app will keep the screen on forever; I might at some point go back and introduce a timer to turn it off after a pre-set period of time for those who tend to fall asleep while reading.

If that sounds like something you'd want, you can pick it up on the Play store for £0.68 (or a similar amount in your local currency). I realise that charging real money (however small an amount) for something that simple is something of a breach of internet etiquette, but it doesn't have any ads or weird data-mining permissions or any of the things that usually come with free products.

How to get Solitaire, Minesweeper, or any other Windows 7 game on Windows 8

2015-04-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

I bought my wife a Windows 8 laptop a little while ago, and while it's very good in many ways and far from the satanic product it's often made out to be, it has one major flaw: it doesn't ship with Solitaire! Or Spider Solitaire, or Minesweeper, or any of those games that make office life ever-so-slightly less awful. Installing these games turned out to be a rather more involved process than I thought it would be, and I thought I'd put together a guide for those who wish to replicate it. While it looks rather complicated, it's not really difficult at all, and I've tried to write this guide so that even the most technophobic of readers can follow it.

It's worth noting at this point that Windows 8 versions of the games are available free from the Microsoft store: just open the store and search for "Microsoft Solitaire Collection". For many, these will be a perfectly acceptable methadone; what follows is for those purists who seek a more traditional opiate. To follow this guide, you will need:

Access to a machine running Windows 7
A memory stick or some other way of copying .exe files to the Windows 8 machine
An internet connection.

Before we start: I'm assuming that Windows on both machines is installed on the C:\ drive, as this is the default position, and have written the instructions accordingly. If you haven't installed Windows on that drive, then substitute whatever drive you did choose for "C:\" in the following instructions.

1) Find and copy the games from Windows 7
On the Windows 7 machine, navigate to "C:\Program Files" and copy the entire "Microsoft Games" folder to your USB stick or whatever medium you're using to transfer the files.

2) Find and copy CardGames.dll
On the Windows 7 machine, navigate to "C:\Windows\System32" and copy the "CardGames.dll" file to the USB stick as you did with the games files from step 1.

3) Install the games on Windows 8
Move the USB stick to the Windows 8 machine, and copy the "Microsoft Games" folder from it to the "C:\Program Files" directory. Copying them to this location will require administrator permissions.

4) Copy CardGames.dll
On the Windows 8 machine, navigate to the "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games" folder you created in step 3. This should contain a number of folders containing the individual game files. Copy the "CardGames.dll" file from the USB stick into each of the folders of the games you wish to play.

5) Disable the version check
Right now, if you try and run any of the game .exe files from the folders you accessed in step 4, nothing will happen. This is because the games are checking what version of Windows you are running and refusing to run on systems that are not using Windows 7. To prevent this check from running you need to edit the .exe files using a hex editor. If you already have a hex editor installed, skip ahead to step 8. If you don't have a hex editor, or have no idea what I'm talking about, read on.

6) Download and install Notepad++
Notepad++ is a free, open source text editor, superficially similar to the Notepad that comes with Windows but much more powerful and useful. Open the Notepad++ download page in your browser of choice, and click the link to download the Notepad++ installer.

Once it's downloaded, run the installer "npp.X.X.X.Installer.exe" from wherever it's downloaded, and follow the instructions (the X.X.X. in that file name will be numbers representing the version of Notepad++). I recommend that you allow the installer to place a shortcut on the desktop, as this will save time later on.

7) Install Notepad++'s Hex Editor plugin
Open Notepad++ if it is not already running, and, from the action bar, select "Plugins", then "Plugin Manager" and "Show Plugin Manager".

In the Plugin Manager that appears, scroll down to "HEX-Editor", tick its box and press "Install". Once this is done, Notepad++ will prompt you to restart it. Allow it to do so, and then close it.

8) Prepare to modify the .exe files
If you are using Notepad++, right-click its icon on the desktop or the start menu and select "Run as Administrator". If you open it normally, you will not be able to edit files in protected locations. If you are using your own hex editor, you should probably start that with administrator privileges as well.

From here on the instructions will be written for those using Notepad++; if you're not using it then you have your own hex editor and so I'm assuming you can follow along.

Once Notepad++ has opened, go to "File", then "Open", and navigate to the games folder ("C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games"), and then open one of the individual games folders. For this example, I'll be using Solitaire. Select the "Solitaire.exe" file and open it.

You'll be presented with a page full of nonsense like this:

We now need to switch to hex editing mode. To do this, select "Plugins", then "HEX-Editor", then "View in HEX".

You should now be presented with a rows of hexadecimals, looking something like this:

We now need to edit this file to stop the version check from running. The edit we need to make will be different depending on whether we got the game files from a 32- or 64-bit version of Windows 7. If you know you're running a 64-bit version, you can skip ahead to step 10. If you don't know what version you're running, or have no idea what I'm talking about, keep reading.

9) Editing for 32-bit
In the open Notepad++ file, search for the following string:

7d 04 83 65 fc 00 33 c0 83 7d fc 01 0f 94 c0

Do this by opening the "Find" window (either click "Search" and then "Find", or press CTRL+F), and copying/typing that string into the "Find what:" box. It doesn't matter whether the letters or capitalised, or whether there are any spaces. Then press "Find Next". If you get an error message reading "Can't Find", you either typed in the string wrong or have a 64-bit version of the file. If the latter, skip to step 10.

Once you've found the string, you need to replace the first "7d" with "eb". You can't delete characters in a hex file, so to do this simply place the cursor in front of the first "7d" and then type "eb".

Then save the file by clicking "File" and then "Save", or by pressing CTRL+S. You can now skip to step 11.

10) Editing for 64-bit
In the open Notepad++ file, search for the following string:

3b c6 0f 4c

Do this by opening the "Find" window (either click "Search" and then "Find", or press CTRL+F), and copying/typing that string into the "Find what:" box. It doesn't matter whether the letters or capitalised, or whether there are any spaces. Then press "Find Next". If you get an error message reading "Can't Find", you either typed in the string wrong or have a 32-bit version of the file. If the latter, go back to step 9.

Once you've found the string, you need to replace the first "3b c6" with "39 c0". You can't delete characters in a hex file, so to do this simply place the cursor in front of the first "3b" and then type "39 c0".

Then save the file by clicking "File" and then "Save", or by pressing CTRL+S.

11) Testing
If you navigate to the Solitaire folder ("C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Solitaire") and run the "Solitaire.exe" file, the game should now open normally. You may now wish to create a shortcut to the game; to do so, right-click the .exe and click "Send to" and then "Desktop (create shortcut)".

Repeat steps 8-10 for each of the games you wish to play.

Hope that helps.

Back to Work: Aspect Ratios and Talent Trees

2014-09-05T14:44:00.001-07:00

My goodness, the last post was in April. How lazy I've been.

In my defence, quite a lot has happened since then. In May I started the full-time crunch/panic appropriate for the end of my degree (actually that started quite a bit earlier, but playing games and writing about them is a pleasant form of procrastination), and then in June I got married. July was mostly spent on my honeymoon, and now August has passed while I sit at my desk, calling strangers and asking them for a job (or rather, another job; I've been employed for the last two years as a writer/editor/VBA developer by a law-publishing firm but it's getting rather dull now). However, I have not been completely idle.

For example, this blog now has more draft posts than published ones. Why? As usual, there's someone who can explain that better than I can:

‘My problem is that I’ve now reached the stage where I really can’t work out what I think unless I write it out; the process of writing is now so intimately connected to my broader processes of cognition and judgement that I can’t really do without it. I’ve got those writerly blue-on-blue eyes now, and without my regular doses of ecriture ‘Melange’ I’d be in a parlous state’ - Adam Roberts

In short, I've been writing posts to work through various game design problems and then, having reached a conclusion in my head, gone away and implemented that solution without writing the rest of it down. Without the need to work through an argument on paper/screen, the post withers and dies like the grass and the flowers that fade, while the word of the LORD stands eternal. Sorry, not sure what happened there.

Anyway, I've been dallying with the idea of working all these little problem-solving exercises into full posts, but I can't quite bring myself to do it—partly because it would represent hard work, to which I am ideologically opposed, and partly because in hindsight the solutions are so obvious that I'd feel like a right muppet admitting that I'd had to think about them at all. On the other hand, it may well be that there are some people out there as stupid as I am (unlikely but theoretically possible), and so someone, somewhere might gain some small benefit from my conclusions. As a compromise between dignity and mistaken do-goodery, I'll make mini versions of each post, summarising the problem and my particular solution. Two will do for now and future ones may get their own posts. Enough waffling.

Aspect Ratios
Problem: Not everyone's PC monitor has the same aspect ratio. Most (players) have 16:9, but many still have 4:3 or others. The usual solution to this, at least with FPSs and similar, is to make exactly the same game but reduce the field-of-view or camera angle for the narrower screens, reducing the amount that you can see on the screen at once. My game is a top-down turn-based team-strategy affair, and I want the entire arena to be visible on-screen at once without having to scroll/zoom, so this camera-based approach isn't going to work.

Solution: Do a Hearthstone and build the arena and UI for 4:3, shoving a few extra strips in on the side in lieu of black-band-letterboxes for 16:9.

Note: While this is more-or-less the only solution given my self-set constraints, it does raise further problems. For example, when designing for 16:9 I had originally intended for the arena to be 'square' (or rather, a regular hexagon) and completely symmetrical, with a vertical panel to the side for the UI. However, in 4:3 this panel-on-the-side is ridiculously slim and feels rather difficult to use (I wonder if Japanese players, more accustomed to up-down text than their Western left-right counterparts, would find this easier to use?) and so a different approach is called for. The arena is no longer perfectly symmetrical and is now wider than it is high, with the saved height going towards a new UI panel along the bottom.

On the left, the old 16:9 design; on the right, the new 4:3 with a squatter hexagon and more wasted space. Can you tell I got a first in my Technical Drawing classes?

While having a wider, shorter game area may not appear to be much of a change compared to a round one, it does make a difference when it comes to things like the range of abilities and mechanics such as kiting. After all, an ability that can only reach a small way horizontally across the board could cover most of it vertically, making it much more powerful than it would be in a regular hexagon. I bring this up as an example of how even quite mundane, pragmatic aspects of design, based purely on necessity, can have an effect on balance. See also: hitscan v projectile weapons and how servers deal with them in multiplayer shooters.

Skill Trees
Problem: Ensuring a high degree of player choice while not requiring all abilities/talents to have equivalent power levels. This is a topic that could easily fill a whole post on its own so I'll keep the explanation brief. I'm going to assume that you all know what skill trees are, because you're reading a blog about game development. For those who don't, they're things like this (that's an old WoW talent tree); a system whereby players can spend points that they've earned over time in order to improve their abilities or learn new ones. There are three main ways of doing this (that I can think of):

List. Simply present a list of all the abilities to the players and let them choose which they'd like. Not many games have this; Divinity: Original Sin has something similar with their perks and Wildstar with its abilities.
Categories. Allow the player to choose one or more abilities within certain categories. An example would be the current WoW talent system, in which one ability can be taken per tier. The same principles are in play in more-or-less every shooter with a loadout system (you can carry one rifle, one pistol, one grenade, for example).
Trees. This is by far the most commonly used system; the aforementioned example is directly descended from Diablo II, which introduced skill trees to non-RTS gaming. Here, ability choice is limited by what abilities have previously been taken, with various dependencies required for certain choices (for example, to unlock ability B you must first have taken ability A, or have spent a certain number of points on abilities in a certain category).

The trade-offs in all these systems are player choice and balance—or rather, between player choice and how easy it is for the developers to balance the game. The list system gives the player the greatest choice but is difficult for the developer, because it requires that all the abilities have roughly equivalent power (if there are abilities that are noticeably more powerful with no downside then players are obviously going to choose them). While this kind of internal balance can often be enforced by fiddling the numbers - increasing cooldowns and reducing damage, etc. - doing so runs the risk of producing rather bland abilities. Furthermore, the developer must also make sure that the various combinations of abilities are balanced, a difficult task considering that the list system allows the player to create a dizzying number of combinations (that's the downside of 'emergent gameplay' - it's rather difficult to balance something you haven't thought of).

The tree system solves this problem by providing a source of external balance - having some extra-powerful abilities in there is fine because players will only be able to choose a limited number of them. The problem of excessive combinations for the developer to balance is also reduced, as the specialisation required of the player to access the most powerful abilities means that the combinations become more of 'variations on a theme' instead of unique compositions. If that sounds like a downside, that's because it is: the problem of so-called 'cookie-cutter' talent choices will be familiar to any TBC/WotLK era WoW players. While the trees above appear to offer hundreds - thousands - of ways to invest the 60-odd points on offer, the reality is that the requirement to specialise and invest a certain number of points per tier to access the mandatory powerful abilities means that the number of actual choices is much lower, and the number of meaningful choices (i.e. options that aren't Wand Specialization) is lower still. In short, tree systems can make it too easy for the player to calculate the 'optimal' solution and then stick with it to the detriment of diversity.

The slot system goes some way to solving this problem: while the total number of choices is much lower than that provided by a tree system, the number of meaningful choices is potentially much higher. In the screenshot above the player can only pick one talent per row, with the rows sorted by 'type' of ability - the first row is a mobility option, the second a damage reduction, the third a control, and so on. The abilities don't synergize particularly well, meaning that 'optimal' decisions don't emerge as readily: whether you've taken Presence of Mind or Blazing Speed or Ice Floes doesn't really affect your decision on whether to take Temporal Shield or Flameglow or Ice Barrier. Of course, this is also a disadvantage - if all the choices are equally valid and don't impact each other then what's the point of having them? Also, the layering of abilities by type reduces player choice fairly dramatically - while it makes it 'idiot proof' in the sense that it's impossible to construct a truly useless build, it also means that players are restricted to a pre-set template of how they 'should' play (if I want to shun all survival options in order to maximize damage, for example, I should be able to).

Solution: What should be obvious from this rather lengthy explanation is that there's no obviously 'right' option in the same way as there was for the aspect ratio problem. Each option has its own advantages and disadvantages and strikes a different balance between player choice and ease of balance. Currently I'm favouring the list solution as it grants the player the most freedom, and trying to impose some level of external balance upon it by pricing each of the options - effectively creating a tree system but without any specialisations or dependencies. This seems to work fairly well, as it creates a nice balance between power and flexibility; players can choose only the powerful abilities, sinking all their points into a small number of options, or they can choose to diversify and pick a larger number of cheaper abilities. The downside to this approach is that it requires the number of abilities a player has access to to be flexible, but that's a coding rather than a balance issue.

Ok, that was rather longer than I intended, but hopefully it gives you some idea of the design process. There's quite a fun little problem involving Spell Reflect I'll probably cover next.

~Roxton.

P.S. My aim from now on is to do a weekly update (regularity being much more important than flexibility) every Saturday morning. I don't know if I'll be able to stick to it, but hopefully saying it will make it so.

First Thoughts: Imagine Earth Demo

2014-04-17T03:56:00.001-07:00

The concept of Serious Brothers’ Imagine Earth is planetary colonization – a concept which, having just completed a Firefly marathon, I found immediately appealing. The difference is that while in Firefly the colonization is performed by governments fleeing an Earth that was ‘all used up’, here you’re an employee of Weyland-Yutani (I forget the actual name), one of a number of corporations who have moved to space to ‘preserve the dogma of unlimited growth’. This may seem to be a rather arbitrary distinction, but the artificial demand for growth becomes increasingly important and is worked into the mechanics in a rather pleasing way.

First, the basics. You start with a single capsule of settlers, dropped into the triangular lattice covering a beautifully animated and rendered Earth-a-like. Within a set distance of this capsule you can build new settlements, farms to feed them, factories to supply them with ‘goods’, and power stations to, well, power them. The land itself comes in different flavours: farmland, desert, rocks, trees, etc., and these interact with your buildings: for example, power stations are more efficient when built on top of ‘fossil deposits’, farms are more efficient when built on farmland, and settlers are happier when further from these and closer to forests.

So far, so simple, but the interactions don’t stop there. Farms and power stations produce both ground and air pollution. Ground pollution extends a short distance each way from the offending building and damages those around it. Air pollution has more insidious effects in causing global warming; if the number of trees and rocks (presumably magic rocks) is insufficient to absorb the emissions from your cities and other buildings then global temperatures will increase, ice caps will melt, sea levels will rise, and ‘extreme’ weather events such as tornadoes will occur.

We're making a better market. All of them... better markets.

Of course, none of this needs to happen. On each of the two levels included in the tutorial it was trivial to produce a happy, stable settlement of about 100,000 people which caused minimal environmental damage. However, here’s where the previously mentioned ‘growth’ problem comes in. Your aim (at least in the levels shown here – I don’t know if there are different objectives later on) is not to build a stable settlement or even to accumulate a certain amount of cash, but to get as many people onto that rock as will fit. You’re not making money, you’re making a market, one which you, the player, will never be allowed to enjoy or even participate in. In service to this goal of peak population you must constantly reinvest the taxes gained from your settlers in expansion, ruthlessly disposing of surplus capital by demolishing rocks and forests and building and upgrading cities in their place. Haussmann would be proud.

Oh, yes, upgrading cities. This is one of many ways in which Imagine Earth feels rather like a Triple Town-style builder: each area of city has a development score, starting at one, which represents the population density of that area. If the total scores of the surrounding cities are higher than a certain amount then you can upgrade that area, increasing its density, and, if you upgrade the original hub, the total amount of land available to you. The first upgrade requires three points, the second six, and so on. This rather elegant equation means that increasing inner-city density requires you to expand elsewhere, which is invariably problematic because the reason you wanted to increase density in the first place is because you had nowhere else to expand. At this point the game becomes a series of puzzles – you need to add more people, but the only space available is next to that power station you built earlier, which would make your people unhappy (unhappy settlers pay less tax – or rather, happy settlers give you bonuses), so you could demolish the station but there’s nowhere else to rebuild it, so you need to upgrade the central hub to get more land, but you can’t do that without building more city, so you build next to the power station anyway and then upgrade the city next to it and then upgrade the next city next to it and then you can upgrade the hub and then you can demolish the station and move it far away and now you have to build another farm to feed all these people which means that you need another station and by this point you’ve produced so much pollution that the ice caps have melted and you’ve lost all your land anyway in devastating condemnation of the evils of global (interglobal?) capitalism.

But it’s not, really. It’s obvious that the game wants you to find yourself in ‘conflicts between the corporations [sic] profit goals to utilize and exploit the planets [sic] resources and the need to preserve the environment for your civilization’ (Serious Brothers), as demonstrated by its smugly superior introduction and the way it portrays your bosses as hideously caricatured cartoons in stark contrast to the beautiful natural environment, but profit never the problem. As previously mentioned, you can only reinvest the profits anyway, so any money you make is always spent for the benefit of the settlers. No, your real enemy here is population growth and the ridiculously small size of the planet. Once you move above that initial, small, stable population the difficulty of supplying all the food, power and goods required for the population without destroying the world increases exponentially. Of course, the narrative stimulus for moving beyond that initial state is the desire for a market to exploit, but to be honest I can’t imagine many gamers being satisfied by building three settlements, a farm, station and factory and then just sitting back and watching it do absolutely nothing for a few hours. If there’s a commentary in there on our apparently natural instinct to expand and grown then it’s well hidden. That the initial population works so well is less a commentary on the danger of Mammon than it is a testament to the (presumably) extremely restrictive birth-control policy of that settlement. For the most part, you make more money by being environmentally friendly thanks to the bonuses for keeping settlers near trees and away from pollution, and by not killing everyone with toxic smog (dead people are notoriously bad at paying taxes). The pressure to not do the 'right' thing comes from space restrictions rather than greed.

However, while its ideology may be muddled its mechanics are not. The demo itself is irritatingly short, giving you only the tutorial and a time-limited taste of the first level, but it’s well worth trying out. It strikes the right balance between complexity and depth, with a handful of elements interacting in interesting ways to produce a wide range of results and challenges. I think I needed to see a little bit more of the game to make up my mind completely, but what I did see I liked enormously.

Imagine Earth is being developed by Serious Brothers and is seeking funding on Indiegogo. You can download the free demo here.

Archer's Sexual Partners

2014-04-04T04:20:00.002-07:00

Dissertations and deadlines have delayed me, but I've finally caught up with the excellent Archer, now in its fifth season. The first three are on Netflix, and while binge-watching I was struck by just how complicated the characters' sexual lives are. After a couple of episodes I went back and started making notes, and continued to do so for the rest of the show. To satisfy some bizarre urge I've charted the various relationships; obviously season five isn't over yet so I'll probably have to make some additions, but for now BEHOLD: [EDIT: Now complete for the end of season five]

Anyway, below are my unpolished notes, if people want to correct any mistakes I might have made:

? = unsure if it counts – using the SO idea. ‘Wouldn’t want to offend that boyfriend of yours, eh what?’

?? = unsure if it happened

??? = both

Only new instances are recorded for each episode; referring to an event already listed does not count

1.1 Mole Hunt

Archer + Unnamed French Air Hostess

??Archer + Receptionist (“I swear to God Mr. Archer I’ve got HR on speed dial!”)

Archer + Lana (flashback)

Archer + two prostitutes (flashback, operational expense (15:31)

??Archer + Expensive Prostitute (flashback, operational expense)

Malory + Nikolai Jackov (phone sex)

?Krieger + fridge food

Archer + Cheryl (flashback)

??Lana + Cyril (implied; they’ve been dating for three months)

1.2 Training Day

Archer + Trinette (“The sick shit I’ve done in this apartment”)

Lana + Cyril (‘The night aint over yet’, ‘your… other qualities’)

??Malory + Kermit Roosevelt Jr. (‘Uncle Kermit’)

1.3 Diversity Hire

Cheryl + Conway

1.4 Killing Utne

??Mannfred + Uta (Clearly in a relationship, probably sexual)

1.5 Honeypot

Malory + Nikolai Jackov (sex tape)

Archer + Schoolgirl Prostitutes

Charles + Rudy (Duh, and or hello)

1.6 Skorpio

Archer + Pita

Archer + Redhead (no way he’s letting her on the terrace otherwise)

Lana + Archer + Skorpio

Cyril + Cheryl

1.7 Skytanic

Cyril + Cheryl

1.8 The Rock

1.9 Job Offer

?Lana + Barry (‘Sorry that I’m accidentally inside you.’ | ‘Not a problem.’)

Archer + Framboise

??Barry + Framboise (‘Well, engaged to be engaged.’)

Cyril + Framboise

1.10 Dial M for Mother

Archer + Starlets

Archer + Models

Archer + Two Actual Princesses

Archer + Brazilian au pair

??Cheryl + Krieger (‘It’s your weak womany hands’)

Malory + Len Trexler

Malory + Buddy Rich

??Archer + Trinette (‘His father knows Krav Maga’)

?Cheryl + ChokeBot

Cyril + Scatterbrain Jane

Cyril + Malory (‘Miss Archer, you’re trying to seduce me’)

Lana + Pam

2.1 Swiss Miss

Sia + Carlito

Sia + Carlito’s Twin

Malory + Pam + Conrad Scholtz

2.2 A Going Concern

Len Trexler + Anastasia

??Ray + Ray’s lesbian wife

2.3 Blood Test

Archer + Trinette (flashback)

Archer + Lana (flashback x2)

?Lana + Cheryl (‘I think I just did’)

Burrows + his wife (presumed, flashback)

??Pam + Cyril (‘I was trying to get him off!’)

Ray + Cyril (‘Hey Cyril. How’s it hanging buddy?’ 4.5: ‘Is it too much to ask…’)

Cyril + Trinette (flashback)

2.4 Pipeline Fever

Lana + Joshua Gray alias Gandalf (flashback)

2.5 The Double Deuce

Woodhouse + two ‘Orientals’ (flashback on a merchant schooner)

2.6 Tragical History

Cyril + The Twins (handjobs)

??The Twins + George Spelvin (‘I think ninjas are hot’ | ‘Right?’)

Archer + every harlot from here to Hanoi

2.7 Movie Star

?Ray + Randy Muckler (‘was just leading me on to get out of the draft’)

Archer + Black-haired woman + Blonde woman (flashback; possibly the same two as seen in 1.1)

Malory + Cyril

2.8 Stage Two

??Archer + Russian Spy (flashback)

Archer + Rita (flashback)

Archer + Vegas prostitute (blowjob)

Dicky + Vegas prostitute (blowjob)

Archer + Cheryl (flashback)

Archer + Lana

??Malory + Dr. Speltz

2.9 Placebo Effect

Malory + Franny Delaney

2.10 El Secuestro

Pam + Moped Guy

2.11 Jeu Monégasque

Archer + snorkelling prostitute (blowjob)

Malory + A Duke

2.12 White Nights

Malory + Nikolai (video sex)

2.13 Double Trouble

Archer + Katya

Party Chairmen (Lemon)

3.1 Heart of Archness: Part I

Archer + newlywed(s)

3.2 Heart of Archness: Part II

Archer + two native girls

Malory + Rip Riley

??Cyril + Pam

3.3 Heart of Archness: Part III

3.4 The Man from Jupiter

Malory + Burt Reynolds

3.5 El Contador

??Ray + Gay Club attendees (he’s not actually paralysed at this point, remember)

??Pam + up to seven guys (‘It tastes worse than it smells!’ | ‘If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a guy say that… I’d have eight nickels!’)

3.6 The Limited

3.7 Drift Problem

???Malory + Cheryl (‘She beat it out of me’)

3.8 Lo Scandalo

Malory + Savio Mascalzoni (‘once a year, for, like, 35 years’)

Malory + beautiful idealistic young Italian man

3.9 Bloody Ferlin

??Archer + stewardess (‘That’s why I’m here and not up to my ears in stewardess’)

Cheryl + Randy Gillette

310 Crossing Over

Archer + Pam (x4)

?Cheryl + Barry (I know they say choke sex later but how would they know? They do tend to assume the worst about her, cf. handcuffed herself to a radiator. Also ‘which at first was really hot, but then…’)

3.11 Skin Game

Archer + the entire Pacific rim

Archer + Katya

Archer + vacuum cleaner (Electrolux?)

Barry + Katya

3.12 Space Race: Part I

Archer + Pam

3.13 Space Race: Part II

4.1 Fugue and Riffs

??Archer + Linda

Malory + Ron Cadillac

4.2 The Wind Cries Mary

Archer + Black-haired woman (flashback)

??Lucas Troy + Black-haired woman (she just blew archer so unlikely)

Lucas Troy + Archer

4.3 Legs

??Malory + Archer’s doctor (flashback)

4.4 Midnight Ron

??Archer + brunette at casino

Archer + Cheryl (chlamydia)

4.5 Viscous Coupling

??Ron + Malory (‘If he plays his cards right…’)

Lana + Cyril

Cheryl + Fireman (she has bruises on her neck)

??Pam + Fireman

??Ray + Octopus

??Cyril + Octopus

4.6 Once Bitten

4.7 Live and Let Dine

Cheryl + Rodney (handjob)

4.8 Coyote Lovely

Border patrol guards (blowjob)

4.9 The Honeymooners

Lana + Cyril

Krieger + Pigley III

4.10 Un Chien Tangerine

??Archer + Dutch co-eds

4.11 The Papal Chase

??Lana + Cyril (‘church stuff’)

??Malory + Cardinal Corelli

4.12 Sea Tunt: Part I

??Cecil Tunt + Tiffy

???Cheryl + Barry (‘Choke sex – that’s her kink – with a KGB cyborg’)

4.13 Sea Tunt: Part II

5.1 White Elephant

?Cheryl + Special Agent Holly’s TASER

??Malory + ‘Him’

5.2 A Kiss While Dying

Archer + his landlord’s wife

??Ramone + Charles + Rudy

5.3 A Debt of Honor

Pam + three Yakuza members (flashback)

5.4 House Call

??Archer + ladyboys (on his semester abroad)

5.5 Southbound and Down

??Pam + truck-stop attendees (‘well, and the snowballs’)

??Pam + Archer (promised, anyway)

5.6 Baby Shower

5.7 Smugglers’ Blues

Archer + au pair (probably previously mentioned in 1.10)

Archer + La Madrina

5.8 The Rules of Extraction

Confirmation of Malory + Pam (‘Oh my God that’s right)

5.9 On the Carpet

5.10 Palace Intrigue: Part I

Archer + Juliana

Archer + someone he bumped into on a train

Archer + someone he bumped into on a ferry

Archer + someone he bumped into in a portable lavatory in Baltimore

??Juliana + Gustavo Calderon (they are married, after all)

5.11 Palace Intrigue: Part II

5.12 Filibuster

5.13 Arrivals/Departures

Charting the Quantity of Harry Potter Fan Fiction

2014-04-03T08:35:00.001-07:00

Ok, so I should probably start with the ‘why’…

As some of you will know, I’m currently concluding my BA in English Literature (don’t laugh). One of the courses available this year was ‘Children’s Literature’. Being an enormous snob I didn’t take it because it included a small section on Harry Potter, and I do not want to have to admit to having studied Rowling, however briefly, for my degree. However, many of my friends (who are not such massive snobs and consequently much nicer, better people) did take the course, and so every now and then the conversation turns Potter-ward. A couple of weeks ago the topic at hand was whether Potter had ‘run its course’, inspired by a remark to that effect from the lecturer (the esteemed and june Adam Roberts), and how one could possibly measure that.

Various ideas were put forward – sales figures, new editions, etc. I suggested fan engagement – in particular the ability of Potter to inspire new ‘literature’ in the form of fan fiction. It would be interesting, I said, to know whether the amount of Harry Potter fan fiction was increasing or decreasing over time.

So that’s what this is: an attempt to measure the subset of a subset of a pointless and frivolous question which benefits no-one. BA students, you’ll feel right at home.

Anyway, onto the ‘how’. FanFiction.net is the largest such website by a considerable margin.¹ At the time of capture it contained 517,847 non-pornographic Harry Potter stories.² Its first, about which I will kindly say no more, was published in September 1999; its most recent appeared about 30 minutes ago. I downloaded the index pages (2.5 GB) using Httrack and then ran a script to sort the entries. Finally, I copied the data into Excel and produced this tasteful graph showing production by month:

Click to enlarge

The blue bars show the number of new stories each month. The red bars show thousands of active site users by year, based on data I found here; I couldn't find comparable data for after 2010 so I've just left it blank. I've also marked the release dates of the various films and books which fit the time-frame shown here; you'll notice that they perfectly fit the various spikes in activity.

So, what happens next? Well, the overall trend is up, but I don't think it's set to continue. You'll notice that we basically have a reverse sawtooth pattern, in which each new release sparks activity which slowly decreases until the next release - this is perhaps most noticeable in the two-year gap between the double release of Phoenix (film) and Hallows (book) in 2007 and the release of Prince (film) in 2009. At this point activity steadily increases - bucking the trend for the first time - and peaks at the release of the final film, since which activity has been steadily decreasing. The Fantastic Beasts trilogy doesn't have a release date yet - or a director, cast or even script - and it's unlikely that we'll see it before 2017. If activity continues to fall at its current rate (it almost certainly won't but hush) then by that time it will be back down to 2001/2 levels.

I'm not going to extrapolate from these results to say anything about the state of Harry Potter as a cultural force; there are too many variables not accounted for to allow any safe conclusion. Maybe everyone's migrating from Fanfiction.net to Tumblr; maybe they're all writing in private, ready to pounce if Kindle Worlds opens the door to them making money off it; maybe the core writing bloc has simply grown up and moved on. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

^{1. A commonly accepted truth, but I went out and had a look around anyway. Fanfiction.net has, at the time of
writing, over 654,000 Harry Potter stories.
Sadly that’s not a typo. As a point of comparison, Harrypotterfanfiction.com
has almost 300,000 such stories and Wattpad.com has about 11,000;
after that there’s a host of small sites such as Ficwad (2585),
Fictioncentral (111) and Fanworks (78) fighting over the scraps. The elephant in the room is Tumblr, which is extremely
hard to analyse properly – it doesn’t even publish user numbers. In any case,
most of the fan fiction there (by my observation) is ‘art’ rather than ‘literature’.↩}

^{2. Observant readers will notice that this something of a drop from the 654,000 mentioned in the previous footnote; that's because there are over 120,000 pornographic Harry Potter stories which my script didn't collect at first due to a filtering error. I thought about going back to add them in, but there are some depths to which even I will not sink, and collecting Harry Potter porn is one of them. One other point worth mentioning is that due to a rather silly scripting error every fiftieth story was omitted from my data collection, a loss of 2%. However, as this loss is evenly distributed across all the data you don't need to worry about it affecting the results. ↩}

Unity Tips: Swipe controls for Android and iOS

2014-03-30T14:23:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a bit of work in Unity lately, putting together a basic Android game to teach myself the basics. I wanted to use swipe controls to move the player, and I think I've come up with a pretty nice template I thought I'd share with any other beginners out there. It's based on this script by Sushanta Chakraborty, but I've made it a bit more powerful and responsive. A brief explanation is below for those still learning C#.

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class SwipeControl : MonoBehaviour
{
//First establish some variables
private Vector3 fp; //First finger position
private Vector3 lp; //Last finger position
public float dragDistance; //Distance needed for a swipe to register

// Update is called once per frame
void Update()
{
//Examine the touch inputs
foreach (Touch touch in Input.touches)
{
if (touch.phase == TouchPhase.Began)
{
fp = touch.position;
lp = touch.position;
}
if (touch.phase == TouchPhase.Moved)
{
lp = touch.position;
}
if (touch.phase == TouchPhase.Ended)
{
//First check if it's actually a drag
if (Mathf.Abs(lp.x - fp.x) > dragDistance || Mathf.Abs(lp.y - fp.y) > dragDistance)
{ //It's a drag
//Now check what direction the drag was
//First check which axis
if (Mathf.Abs(lp.x - fp.x) > Mathf.Abs(lp.y - fp.y))
{ //If the horizontal movement is greater than the vertical movement...
if (lp.x>fp.x) //If the movement was to the right
{ //Right move
//MOVE RIGHT CODE HERE
}
else
{ //Left move
//MOVE LEFT CODE HERE
}
}
else
{ //the vertical movement is greater than the horizontal movement
if (lp.y>fp.y) //If the movement was up
{ //Up move
//MOVE UP CODE HERE
}
else
{ //Down move
//MOVE DOWN CODE HERE
}
}
}
else
{ //It's a tap
//TAP CODE HERE
}

}
}
}

Ok, so what's happening here?

First, we set up a load of variables. The private variables are for use within this script only; the public ones can be edited from the Unity inspector and other scripts.
dragDistance is the distance a player must drag their finger/thumb for it to register as a swipe instead of a tap, and because it's a public variable you can set this in the inspector. In my game it's set at 5, but it depends on your device and game so experiment. REMEMBER TO SET THIS IN THE INSPECTOR OR THE CODE WILL NOT WORK.
Next we move into the Update function, which is called every step.
We examine every touch:

If the player has just touched their finger to the device, we set 'fp' and 'lp' to their finger's position.
If the player's finger is on the device but it's been there for more than one frame, we set 'lp' to their finger's current position.
If the player has just removed their finger from the device, we move on to the next bit (no need to record the position because it's going to be indistinguishable from its position in the previous step).

We compare the first and last finger positions ('fp' and 'lp') to see if the distance travelled is enough to qualify as a drag. The IF statement below is a little confusing-looking so let's break it down:

We could just subtract one point from the other (if lp-fp>dragDistance), but this has two problems:

This gives us the diagonal distance, which is always larger than either the horizontal or the vertical distance (thanks, Pythagoras). This means that a player's tap might be accidentally interpreted as a drag, even if it is less than our specified dragDistance. To solve this, we instead check both the horizontal distance (lp.x-fp.x) and the vertical distance (lp.y-fp.y) travelled by the finger, and if either of them is large enough we register a drag as having taken place. The '||' symbol means OR in C#.
Coordinates increase from left to right, meaning that if you drag from right to left the distance will be negative - the same applies to drawing up rather than down. To avoid this we instead use the 'absolute' distances; that is, their size regardless of their positive or negative status. The absolute value of -6 is 6; the absolute value of 6 is 6. 'Abs' is how we do this in C#, but we have to precede it with 'Mathf' to tell Unity what we're doing.

Thus, the statement compares both the absolute vertical distance and absolute horizontal distance travelled by the finger to our dragDistance; if either or both are larger we move on to the next step.

Now we need to check whether the player meant to swipe vertically or horizontally, which we do by comparing the absolute distances we saw in the previous step.
Having determined that, we check the direction of the swipe within each of these stages by comparing the final to the starting coordinates.

I've probably explained more than I need to there, but if you do have any questions please leave them below.

~Roxton.

Review: Yorkshire Tea

2014-03-28T09:52:00.000-07:00

The first thing you need to know about Yorkshire Tea is that it's not actually from Yorkshire. If, like me, you were expecting, nay, hoping, for a vast, Eden Project-esque biome covering the North York Moors, filled with tea fields, you will be disappointed. The name is purely a branding exercise exploiting the fact that the company selling the tea was founded by a Swiss man who opened a tea shop in Harrogate, which, for our foreign readers, is in the West Riding of Yorkshire, which is in England, which is part of Great Britain, which is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is mostly situated on the British Isles. While the brand itself has been around for a while, it started advertising fairly vigorously about five years ago, and has been getting product placement from TV shows and celebrities and so on, which is odd, for tea. But then, so is trying to market 'Yorkshireness' as a desirable commodity.

But enough preamble. What's the tea like? Well, to answer that I probably ought to tell you a little about my tea-drinking preferences; in areas of taste there's almost no objective handle to be found, and so one must understand the subjective biases of the reviewer in order to parse and render their opinions. I am a Strong Tea man. I like my elements so mixed that a spoon might stand up in them. However, I am also a man of Taste. No PG Tips or Tetleys for me. 'But those are strong teas!' I hear you cry. Yes, they are. But, just as one can desire strong alcohol without wanting to drink prison lavatory wine, one can like strong tea without wanting PG Tips. It is not that it is too strong for me; it is that it is unbelievably shit. When I drink a gin and tonic it is mostly gin, but it is good gin. So, strength and refinement, that's me. If I weren't engaged this would probably make an excellent dating profile.

My spirits were raised, then, when I looked at the side of the box and saw that it recommended a full five minutes of brewing time. 'This', I said, filling the teapot, 'is a tea that demands to be strong'. I was wrong.

Yorkshire Tea is incredibly bland. The five minutes brewing time is recommended because if you gave it any less you'd be drinking a mug of hot, grey, diluted milk. It's not that the taste is unpleasant - quite the opposite - it's just that there's very little of it. And, bizarrely, it's not a question of concentration. I tried two bags, then three; then leaving it for ten minutes, then fifteen; then stirring - and it didn't make the slightest bit of difference. No matter how strong you make it, the flavour never really manifests itself.

It's driving me a little bit mad. I bought a several-thousand-bag chest of it from Tesco because they were out of everything else, and now I haven't had a proper cup of tea for weeks. I'm drinking it as fast as I can, but that just makes it worse, because the cravings keep getting stronger and stronger. I'm currently editing a fifteenth-century manuscript due in for Wednesday, and I'm staying up all night to get it done, and I haven't had anything to drink for so long and I really need it and GIVE ME A GOD-DAMN CUP OF TEA I WILL BURN THIS PLACE TO THE GROUND

Thief and Stealth Systems

2014-03-13T02:04:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know I'd said that this would be about plausible level design, but that's taking me rather longer to research than I expected, so instead let's talk about stealth systems. What I want to do here is define the characteristics of stealth in the original Thief games (particularly T1 and T2), compare these to stealth in Thief, and examine how the stealth systems have affected the rest of the game.¹

In the beginning we lived as thieves

The easiest way to describe the stealth systems in Thief is to list the ways in which the player could be discovered by the AI. You could be seen, heard, or noticed. By 'noticed', I mean that a guard could become aware of your presence not because they saw you, but because they saw something you had done to the world, such as the dead or unconscious body of a guard. 'Noticing' is probably the area which changed the most over the course of the series: guards in T1 only responded to bloodstains or bodies, but by T:DS they could notice open doors, doused torches and missing loot. Covering most of one's tracks was easy, but hiding bodies was a slower process that frequently caused the player to become more exposed. In the first two games, bloodstains could only be removed by water arrows, forcing the player to balance the risk of a guard discovering them against the cost of the arrow.

This balance of risks was also present in the most prominent aspect of sound-in-stealth: footsteps. The sound of the player's footsteps was affected both by their speed (running and jumping were extremely loud; creeping was almost silent), and by the various surfaces, which ranged from grass and carpet (extremely quiet) to marble and metal (extremely loud). It would quite often be contrived so that areas with the 'loudest' flooring were also fairly well lit, forcing the player to make a choice between a quick dash from shadow to shadow (reducing the chances of being seen but increasing those of being heard), or creeping across in an agonising crawl, silent but completely exposed and expecting the shout of a guard at any second. Alternatively, one could fire a moss arrow at the offending surface, covering it in beautiful bryophyta and dampening your footfalls.

However, player sound was not just limited to footsteps. The click of a lockpick or the creak of a door could attract attention, as could the thud of a sword or an arrow. This last could also be used to create distractions (indeed, there was an arrow called the 'noisemaker' specifically designed for this purpose, though it was so expensive that I hardly ever used it), though these could also be created by throwing nearby objects.

Finally, a guard could see you. Visual stealth was based on a player's 'visibility' value, which determined the distance from which the player could be seen. Running or jumping increased visibility; crouching reduced it. Drawing the bow increased visibility slightly, drawing the sword increased it more, and notching a fire arrow increased it massively, lighting you up for the whole map to see. Light and shadow played by far the largest part of visibility, and the player quickly came to recognise light sources as their biggest enemy (after burricks). Fortunately, there were ways of dealing with these: water arrows could douse open flames, and some electric lights had switches.

According to thy visible systems shall they judge ye

Of course, you can have the most involved and detailed stealth system in the world, but it's all for nought if you can't communicate it to the player. The audio aspects tend to sort themselves out, and 'noticing' tends to be explained through tutorials, loading screen tips and guard reactions, but for visual stealth to work the player has to know how visible they are. The foul-mouthed sage of the industry once cited this as one of Thief's greatest strengths, and the way in which this was done was through the light gem, shown below.²

2¹⁶ shades of grey

Of course, simply having a bright gem didn't necessarily mean that you were visible - you could be out of line of sight, or just have murdered all the people in the level - but it gave you a way of judging your visibility the same way that hearing your footsteps gave you an idea of how much noise you were making. The reason I bring this up is for self defence - I've almost certainly made some mistakes about the details of the systems somewhere in this article, but I'm reporting the systems as they were shown to me. If Dishonoured did in fact have a shadow-based stealth system I couldn't tell. Basically I'm working with reader-response (player-response?) here.

Back to the future

So, we have now, in fairly exhaustive detail, covered the stealth mechanics of the first three Thief games. So how does Thief measure up?

In terms of 'noticing' (still a terrible name, I know), the systems have mostly improved. Guards are now more responsive to doors mysteriously opening and closing themselves, and will become extremely suspicious if a light source near them is extinguished - they'll also relight it, which caught me by surprise an embarrassing number of times. There have also been environmental developments: it is now possible (and frustratingly easy) to knock over brooms and vases by moving too close to them, which will alert a guard. Dogs and birds (both in cages) have also been added, each of which can detect you in different ways. Dogs will bark if you get too close, no matter how stealthy you are, but birds will only react if you make any sudden movements or noises. At one point I was carefully picking a lock on a desk under a bird cage, and when I slipped and hit the pin incorrectly the click was sufficient to scare the animal and call a guard over. Another nice addition is the ability to store a couple of bottles or glasses in your inventory and throw them as distractions later (a distinct improvement on the original system).

However, the other systems have been ruthlessly simplified. The wide range of surfaces has been reduced to 'broken glass and water: extremely loud', and 'all other surfaces: silent except when running'. Similarly, the number of variables impacting visibility have been drastically reduced. Compare the shades of the .gif above to the three states shown below:

I know it seems unfair to contrast three still images with a looping gif, but those really are the only three states. I spent about ten minutes carefully sidling and jumping and moving in and out of light and that's all I could get. In practice, the middle state hardly ever occurs, and so for a good two-thirds of the game stealth is effectively a binary system: you're either fully illuminated and visible, or in shadows and invisible. Moreover, lighting is the only factor affecting your visibility; moving or crouching make no difference either way, and neither does drawing a weapon (even a fire arrow).

What's happened is that the focus of stealth has moved from shadows to cover. While line-of-sight was of course a part of stealth in Thief, it wasn't awarded anywhere near the degree of prominence it is in Thief. Levels like 'Dirty Secrets' (the brothel) are designed almost entirely around cover, as much of them are permanently fully lit. I find myself crouching much more while playing Thief than I did the earlier games, and it seems to be because there are so many chest-high walls to hide behind (disguised as crates, tables, chests of drawers, etc.).

Now, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with using cover instead of shadows, but it is an interesting choice, especially considering the effort that has clearly gone into creating the excellent lighting effects. Obviously we can only speculate as to why certain decisions are made, but it is certainly possible to feel the influence of previous games, particularly Dishonoured (2012) and Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) which, like Thief, was made by Eidos Montreal.

Stop copying me while I'm copying you

In both these games, the stealth is based primarily around cover and line-of-sight, and so both games necessarily have mechanics that allow the player to move quickly through the available cover. In DX:HR this comes in the form of the neatly-animated flips and rolls between crates, and in Dishonoured this mechanic is Blink, a short-range targeted teleport. Even more so than in DX:HR, stealth in Dishonoured was dependent on movement and keeping out of line of sight - lighting played absolutely no part. Verticality played a large part in this as well - Blink allowed you to teleport upwards as well as along - and any time I had my feet on the ground as opposed to a rooftop or drainpipe I felt as though I was playing the game wrong.

Thief, having begun to transfer its eggs into the cover basket, realised that it needed a cover-transfer mechanic too, and so 'swoop' was born. Swoop, activated by hitting the space bar and hoping that you're not standing near a context-sensitive jump-point (hah, just kidding, there are only about ten places you can jump in the entire game) moves the player forward very rapidly for a short distance. Thematically it's bizarre, but mechanically it works surprisingly well, helping you to quickly escape a tricky situation, silently approach a guard to blackjack or pickpocket them, or, and this is its main use, to pass gaps in cover. Crouched behind cover, by the end of the game I found that I was almost completely disregarding whether an area was well-lit or not in favour of simply remaining out of line of sight and swooping to my next hiding point.

But, really, why does that matter? Both Dishonoured and DX:HR were excellent games which relied on cover-based stealth, so it's clearly not an intrinsically bad mechanic. So is this preference for shadows over cover simply nostalgic conservatism?

Well, not completely. The thing about cover-based systems is that they require cover, and this necessarily limits the options open to the player and the designer. Unless there's some way of manipulating or moving the cover (and there isn't, really, in any of the three games being discussed here, occasional crate-dropping aside), the player is limited to the paths laid out by the designer, and the designer is forced to create those paths to make the level playable. Put simply, cover systems are waypoint graphs; shadows are navigation meshes.³The shadows of the early Thief games allowed for much more emergent gameplay, as the player is freer to move around a particular area, as opposed to being spotted as soon as they move from cover or their conveniently placed overhead ledge. In DX:HR the relative linearity of the cover didn't matter, because the levels were only a small part of a much larger game which placed more emphasis on its mass of narratives, character interactions, and upgrade systems, and in Dishonoured Blink was such a powerful tool that it drastically reduced the amount of cover needed, in turn freeing the developers from having to build obvious paths for the player. However, Thief has no such saving graces, and it suffers for it.

An example. Below are two screenshots. The left-hand one is from Thief (2014), the right-hand one is from Thief II (2000). Both are from the second missions of their respective games, in both of which Garrett is required to break into a large warehouse. You should be able to click the images to embiggen them.

Imagine that in both these cases the player wants to cross the courtyard. In Thief, the cover-based stealth means that the route through the courtyard is an obvious choice from a very small number of possibilities. All the beautiful corpse ash floating around makes it a little hard to see, so I've highlighted the route in red. If you like, you can use water arrows on the flames circled in blue, but it's not really necessary as you can swoop through all the lights. You can of course move through the courtyard however you like, but there's a dog on the other side, which limits the area in which you can move undetected. The 'alternative route' here is located under the bridge, where there's a hatch which allows you to press 'E' to skip the courtyard (if you bought the wrench).

Now look at the right-hand image. I've turned the gamma up massively because otherwise it's basically a black screen, but observe how this courtyard (apart from being bigger than most of the level in Thief) doesn't use crates as primary cover. There are gaps between them into which you can dash if you hear a guard coming, but their cover is temporary, meant as a stopping point rather than the main means of approach. Instead, the player must stick to the shadows (which, sadly, aren't really shown here as a result of the aforementioned gamma tinkering) in the middle, and distract or dodge the guards as they approach. For alternative routes, the player can backtrack and climb up to the ledge on the building on the left, or go through the warehouse itself (or even all the way around it), or hug the right-hand wall and climb the crates wherever possible - a slow-fall potion in the crate I'm standing on means that should you wish you could float onto the next pile and work from there. The player has much, much more freedom, despite the level containing much less cover and clutter.

I don't want to talk too much about level design here - that's something I'm saving for next week - but I think I've made it clear how a level designed with cover in mind can overly restrict the player and produce unpleasantly linear levels. That's not to say that it's the only factor affecting a level, or that cover-based systems always produce bad results (see the discussion of Dishonoured and DX:HR above), or even that the above example is fully representative of Thief (though, sadly, it is more representative than it should be), but simply that in this case it's been more of a hindrance than a help.

Next time (hopefully), plausible level design.

~Roxton.

^{1. In case it wasn't clear, I'm using 'Thief' (sans italics) to refer to the original series, and 'Thief' to refer to the 2014 release. If people in marketing weren't bitter, empty simulacra of actual human beings this would of course be unnecessary.↩}
^{2. In many ways, Yahtzee is the Foul Ole Ron of the video game world, dropping occasional insights among amusing profanities.↩}
^{3. For those who have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, a nice basic guide can be found here. ↩}

Thief in Brief

2014-03-10T07:11:00.000-07:00

I finished Thief on the day it came out, and I’ve been trying to write a review ever since. It currently stands at around 11,000 words – far too long, even for a blog as self-indulgent and meandering as this one,¹ and so instead putting out one massive review, I’m going to write a series of posts covering various aspects of the game such as level design, stealth, etc., and my thoughts about those aspects of games in general. For now, though, a review in miniature.

Options menu (turning off loot-glint etc.) allows for a large range of play-styles, accommodating newcomers to the franchise as well as veteran players. Same applies to custom difficulty settings. Graphics are superb; aesthetics are muddled and frequently dull.
Excellent optimisation (my now-fairly-old-PC ran everything on ‘High’ without breaking a sweat).²
Story is both idiotic and badly told. Contrast this with T1, T2 and T:DS, which were merely idiotic.

That said, I enjoyed Garrett’s characterisation in the tutorial level, in which he is cast as the veteran Thief player against the girl’s CODBLOPS mentality. Shame that didn’t last more than five minutes.

As the game goes on the story gets worse and the levels get better. At least, until the last level-and-a-bit, when the two join hands and jump off a cliff.
Most of the loot stolen is low-grade tat like inkwells (2G, approximately 4% of the cost of an arrow) and the City’s equivalent of blue plaques, which Garrett just hoards for no appreciable reason. This change from master thief to petty vandal is jarring.
Replacing free-jumping with context-sensitive ‘swooping’ is not an inherently bad decision, but combines with the extremely limiting environments to exacerbate feelings of linearity and hand-holding (you can only jump on areas splashed with white paint, of which there are far too few). The effect is far more than a ‘video-gamey necessity to not let a grown-ass man jump a couple of feet in the air’. More on this in a later post.
Guards in combat can now be bludgeoned into unconsciousness with the blackjack, which to my mind is a pleasant alternative to the flight-or-kill dichotomy presented by previous games.

Similarly, the combat, while basic (attack; if theyblocked then dodge; else attack;), is definitely on a par with the sword-play of the first two titles, and may well be better.

The City doesn’t work as a hub or a cogent location. Again, more on that in a later post.
Lots of reviews have tried to balance themselves by going ‘well a lot of it is rubbish, but the levels are really good’, without really explaining what they mean by ‘good’.³ Unfortunately, neither can I. All the levels I played were either completely linear (in one case quite literally on rails), or ended after about fifteen minutes.

Let me elaborate on that last point. One of the early missions is set in a brothel, which you spend quite a bit of time locating and sneaking into. Once you’re in, it’s obvious that this is one of those large levels with lots of room for exploration etc., and I got very excited. Unfortunately, I found the secret passage in the study (that’s not a spoiler because the game tells you where it is) right at the beginning of my explorations, and once you’ve entered that passage you’re stuck and can’t go back and explore any more. So maybe the brothel’s great, but I couldn’t tell you about it. A similar thing happens a level or so later, when you have to break into an architect’s house. ‘This house was built by the architect himself!’ I heard a guard say. ‘It’s full of traps and secret passages!’. ‘Excellent!’ I thought. ‘It’s Casing the Joint all over again!’. But then I found the secret passage into the study in the first 30 seconds, and then the level ended. So, yeah, maybe it’s great. I couldn’t possibly comment.
I also tried some of the sub missions. They mostly consisted of me running around and around the same building trying to find the one pre-determined spot where I could fire a rope-arrow to climb up to the only entry-point to the mission.
One level really was good, though, and that’s the Shalebridge Cradle knock-off (I can’t remember what it’s called). It has a terrible ending but the first half-hour or so was genuinely atmospheric and tense and when my cat jumped up for cuddles I nearly killed her by accident.

Ok, so that wasn’t as brief as I’d hoped. Next up, Thief and Plausible Level Design.

~Roxton.

^1.I quite like the idea of a meandering blog, carving ever-increasing curves into the receiving earth until eventually the curve becomes separated from the main flow and becomes an ox-blog lake. Come to think of it, that’s what Adam Roberts does, and it seems to work for him.^↩

^2.I realise that talking about the technical side of games – graphics, optimisation, and the like – is the kind of thing that we’re supposed to mock now, as though games were some kind of rarefied art form injected directly into our brains without any intervening medium, but Thief has some of the best graphics I think I’ve ever seen, especially in areas of lighting and shadows, and to accomplish that as well as the aforementioned optimisation in the weird gap between console generations is worthy of comment.^↩

^3.John Walker, at RPS: ‘[The story is] utter, utter bilge, horribly written […] fortunately, it matters very little, since it’s only there as an excuse to link epic, intricate and hugely enjoyable levels together.’

Jerry Holkins, at PA: ‘The city hub is a haphazard labyrinth, and not the good kind […] But, oh, once you get there. Places! Real places, clever places, solid places that I believe in and inhabit.’

Fabio Bortolotti, at IGN Italia: ‘The story and setting could seem tedious or uninspired, but the quality of the design and the abundance of content pardons any imperfections’ (badly trans. from Italian, sorry).^↩

Review: Sherlock, The Sign of Three

2014-01-06T02:47:00.000-08:00

"There are", said Holmes, drying his hands in the court lavatories, "two types of fan. People who love the show because it's a clever, well-written and excellently acted series with ingenious plots and smart references to the original texts - Type A."

"What's Type B?" asks the hashtagger in a deerstalker.

"People who just want to see all the characters have sex."

When Sherlock returned after a two-year gap with The Empty Hearse, I resisted the temptation to write a review. Really, there wasn't much point. From the brilliant introduction clearly designed just to screw with Twitter to the wall-clawing audience surrogate that was Anderson, it was an episode that presented no reasonable point of attack. Like Sherlock planning his 13 roof-top scenarios, every possible criticism had been predicted and answered within the show itself. Oh, it was too self-referential, too self-absorbed, too focused on baiting the internet fanbase to provide a decent plot, but it didn't matter because the individual moments were funny enough to carry it, and, honestly, after two years they could have just released a slide-show of Cumberbatch pulling silly faces and it would have been enough. Sherlock, I thought, was still better than everything else on TV, no matter how bad it gets.

Sadly, this is not true for the second episode, The Sign of Three. There's the odd funny moment - some of them very funny ("high functioning sociopath, with your number") - but there's not enough to cover the fact that this is a horribly awkward, dreadfully plotted, terribly written episode. Taking fan-fiction suggestions and turning them into a script worked for Hearse when it was being done in jest, but here the show has taken on too much and treated it too seriously. If anything, it's an excellent reminder of why we have professional writers. Look at it logically. Elements like incompetent Sherlock, spandex Mycroft and drunk Watson are all amusing and/or moving because they are deviations from the norm - there's nothing inherently funny about any of them (if Watson were drunk all the time he'd be another tragic victim of Gulf War syndrome). However, if you have enough deviations then the norm itself changes, and your internet-assembled episodes don't have the difference they need to be effective. Sherlock's terrible speech went from funny to awkward to unbearably awkward to boring within about five minutes, and then carried on for another thirty-five. When he finally came to 'the feels' too much had been said that was unforgivable - most of it uncomfortable silence - and no matter how much the 'best and bravest' line would be repeated it had simply come too late to be interesting. For the first time ever I was wishing for an episode of Sherlock to end.

In the introductory letter to Busman's Honeymoon, in which the famous sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey finally weds Harriet Vane, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote:

It has been said, by myself and others, that a love-interest is only an intrusion upon a detective story. But to the characters involved, the detective-interest might well seem an infuriating intrusion upon their love-story [...] If there is but a ha'porth of detection to an intolerable deal of saccharine, let the occasion be the excuse.

My objection to this episode is not of this type. I do not ask that all human interest be removed to make room for detection. In fact, Hearse would probably have been improved by removing the lamentably weak and uninteresting mystery all together and focusing purely on the relationships. Rather, I want to see the overall quality maintained. Somehow the first two series managed to focus on excellent mysteries while still leaving plenty of room for character development. The third series appears to be attempting to reverse the formula, and if it had succeeded I would be applauding. Sadly, however, it has only succeeded in both trivialising the plot and reducing the character interaction to the crude, ugly strokes of a tenth-season sitcom.

Maybe I'm just biased. I'm getting married in a few months, and I can't help feeling that if my best man spent the entire speech talking about himself I'd be pretty pissed off, no matter how nice the concluding sentence. Ultimately, Sherlock's embarrassing performance at the wedding mirrors the embarrassing performance of the episode: unpleasant, self-absorbed and self-satisfied, requiring more excuses (the second episode has always been bad; it's meant to be awkward) than can ever be given.

~Roxton.

Sherlock, Season 3 Episode 2, The Sign of Three is currently available on BBC Iplayer.

Bootnote:

Yes, I noticed Mary's reaction to CAM, I'm not blind. Hopefully we'll see things pick up for the series finale. Wondering if the downgraded 'casual acquaintance' is important à la Gay Jim.
Cumberbatch is still as terrible at faking the violin as he was in Belgravia.

Also that dance wasn't sweet, it was terrible.

The invisible dagger solution was actually pretty clever; shame it wasn't given more prominence.
Midget with a blowtorch was a nice Rachel-esque touch.

Sloth wasteth the sluggish body

2013-12-21T09:36:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed that there have been no updates on the game development section of the blog for an embarrassingly long time now. I can make the usual excuses - I'm planning a wedding; I've got five essays and a book to write over the next three weeks; I'm too exhausted from work and am putting my free time into Hearthstone instead - but to be honest it's more because I'm lacking certainty in my convictions.

The problem is that I'm making a game where I should really be making a prototype. The foundations are all there, but currently the only way to actually play test mechanics is to code them in and then try them. This works, but takes a lot of time and effort because adding even quite a simple mechanic (e.g. an absorption effect) requires the alteration of a huge amount of existing code in addition to the new stuff piled on top. Oh, there are ways of mitigating the damage, which I've done, but the problem is that rapid prototyping just isn't really do-able with my skill-set and time restraints.

The solution to this, I've decided, is to take the game out of the computer and model it as a board game instead. There are, I think, a number of advantages to this approach. First, it makes rapid prototyping much easier. Instead of spending an hour unpicking my dearly-devised code I can simply print some more cards. Second, it forces me to simplify. There are always some mechanics which are better suited to a computer, even in turn-based games, but when you're having to map things physically it really forces you to question their necessity. For example, I'm currently running with nine (nine!) debuff categories, which can surely be consolidated. Third, it means that instead of having to worry about interfaces and so on (I know they're important but I don't want to be having to code an interface just to know if Frostbolt works as a mechanic) I can focus purely on the mechanics. Finally, it makes it easier for me to get my fiancée involved, and I value her opinion highly.

So, I'm going to go away and have a think about it, and get some cards and counters drawn up, and then when it's running I'll take photos and so on and show you all how it works.

~Roxton.

Patch Notes or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Metagame

2013-12-10T08:13:00.001-08:00

So right now there's a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth going on because Blizzard have released their most recent patch notes for Hearthstone, and instead of fixing what the people on Reddit think is broken today, they've tried to fix what people on Reddit thought was broken yesterday. In particular, lots of people are angry about Mages, and Mages didn't get nerfed. In fact, claim some of the subreddit's more brilliant minds, the fact that things were nerfed that were not Mages means that Mages are actually being buffed.

As usual, the internet is overreacting, and here's why.

It's not actually that hard to make a deck that can reliably beat a Mage. People have been doing it for a long time, and it usually comes down to a combination of weapon (or other direct) damage, healing, and large minions. If you don't believe me, go and get the Trolladin running and try it out. Hilarity will ensue. The problem with this, as I'm sure you've realised, is that these three components fare extremely badly against the current popular metagame, which revolves around large swarms of cheap minions (Curi's Warlock deck is probably the definitive example of this). Mages are one of the few decks that can really deal with the swarm meta because of their large numbers of freezes and board clears, and so we have a Rock-Paper-Scissors arrangement: Trolladin beats Mages, Mages beat Swarm, and Swarm beats Trolladin. Reddit is angry because they don't have a deck that beats Swarm and Mages.

This isn't quite as unreasonable as it might sound, because currently the number of Mages is too low to make it worth playing Trolladin, but high enough to significantly dent the win ratio of anyone playing Swarm. Add to this the dominance of Mages in a recent tournament and you can almost understand why people are crying. So, if there is a problem, how can we fix it?

To answer that we need to know just how the problem arose in the first place. You don't have to go back very far to find people complaining about Priests as much as they are now about Mages: in fact, one of the highest-rated /r/hearthstone posts of all time is a 'humorous' complaint about Mind Control. While Priests were by no means completely overpowered, they had a number of abilities which made their presence disproportionately felt. Shadows Words Pain and Death provided exceptional single-target removal and Mind Control dominated the end-game: if you had enough mana to play a really scary threat, a Priest had enough mana to turn it against you. The metagame shifted to accomodate the threat posed by these abilities. If one used large numbers of cheap minions, the loss of one or two to Shadow Words was less painful, and if the Priest survived into the end-game then using Mind Control on a small minion simply wasn't economical. It was found that combining the swarm with the more powerful buff cards such as Defender of Argus and Shattered Sun Cleric made it viable against fat minions as well, and so the Swarm rose.

This was great news for Mages, because their biggest weakness is large minions. There are only two Polymorphs in a deck, and if one starts throwing Fireballs into minions then one loses a large part of the burn required for victory. Freezes and Ice Block allowed them to stall through the Swarm's relentless aggression and deliver a killing blow with Pyroblast, but AoE abilities are massively inefficient against small numbers of minions, and if she can't get good useage out of her sweeps then a Mage is going to lose.

So far, we have seen how a strong end-game ability - Mind Control - has helped the Mage to victory by reducing the number of large minions being played. However, Blizzard have now nerfed Mind Control by increasing its mana cost to 10. People have been characterising this as 'too little, too late' - and perhaps it is - but my hope is that either intentionally or deliberately Blizzard have allowed the possibility of a return to larger minions. They are also slightly reducing the strength of the most popular swarm decks - Warlocks - by increasing the self-damage dealt by Flame Imps, and by lowering the health of the Shattered Sun Cleric and Argent Commander, two of the strongest neutral cards in the current meta and a large part of mid-to-late-game Swarm's success. Weakening these also increases the viability of anti-Mage decks running fewer, larger minions.[1]

So, that's my prediction. A slightly nerfed Swarm and a safer end-game will produce decks that focus on fewer, larger minions, possibly with large combo and buff capabilities, which will be strongest against Mages and at least competitive against aggro and rush decks. The system is working as intended.

HOWEVER

There is no denying that Mages are on the strong side. I don't think they're actually overpowered, but they could use a tweak. The best suspect is Pyroblast, which is probably the biggest problem with the Mage right now. Constant stalling and delaying through freezes is annoying, but it wouldn't matter as much if one weren't racing against time before the Mage draws Pyro and ends the game. The simplest solution is to raise its cost to 10 mana. This not only gives the other class more time to deal critical damage, but also reduces the likelihood of the Mage dealing critical damage by preventing the combination of Pyroblast with Frostbolt/Fireblast/Arcane Missiles. It might also be necessary to reduce the damage, but that should wait for the next patch as it may well be that people don't want to run double-Pyro if it costs 10 mana, and therefore the potential total damage of the spell is halved anyway.

Taking care of Pyroblast is probably all that is needed. People have been whining a lot about freezes, and yes, they are annoying if you're running massive packs of minions, so stop running massive packs of minions into freezes. If the control was just control rather than a delaying tactic until Pyro ends the game I think they would be much more tolerable; certainly it should be held back for a patch to see what happens. If larger minions make a comeback freezes will be less useful anyway.

Similarly, larger minions would take the sting out of Fireball by acting as a psychological spell taunt - the metagame should be allowed to adapt before it is nerfed.

I think that's the most important thing to remember here. People seem to expect the developer to step in every time one class or strategy becomes dominant, but in almost all cases the metagame is able to adjust itself. Priests have fallen down the rankings without any devine intervention, and it's only relatively recently that people have started really noticing Mages (they've been solid for ages but it took the plague of aggro decks to make them really shine). One tournament does not a summer make, and am sure that the better players will be able to adapt.

~Roxton.

BOOTNOTE:
It's probably worth mentioning the tournaments and arena. In both these areas Mages are rather stronger than they are in constructed. In tournaments, this is because the classes that are strongest against Mages - Rogues, Warriors and Paladins - are severely damaged by the sideboard rules which allow people to swap in Acidic Swamp Oozes and Harrison Jones to devastate weapon-users. This is one of those problems that really does require a developer fix, as the reason sideboarding is allowed is because it's impossible to prevent with the current state of the client (it's still in beta, let's remember).

When it comes to arenas Mages are dominant for three reasons:

The easiest and simplest (though not necessarily best) arena strategy is to take lots of low-mana minions and aggro to victory, and Mages have very easy common counters to that.
Cards like Flamestrike are inherently on the higher end of the power curve.
With the exception of secrets, Mage cards are highly independent and perform at near-equal power regardless of the other cards in the deck. As you can't rely on getting specific cards in arena, independent cards like Chillwind Yeti are naturally stronger. Almost all Mage cards are highly independent.

Arena balance is a problem, but not one I'm going to discuss here. The semi-random allocation of heroes means that the implications of imbalance issues are reduced in any case.

[1] Of course, it's important to note that the reduction of these minions to two health is great for Mages as it brings them into Blizzard range, but the same is also true of Druids and Priests.

Making a physical Hearthstone set

2013-12-06T07:39:00.001-08:00

I've been playing a lot of Hearthstone recently, and while I love it dearly, I do feel the lack of the physical element that accompanies other board/card games. In particular, I can't play it with my fiancée because she doesn't have a beta key. And even if she did, playing a game like this on two separate screens or tablets just feels silly. So, how can I make a physical version of the game that we can enjoy together? No, I don't mean a box with a tablet in it, cool though that undoubtedly is. I mean a real actual card game with cards and counters and the like.

Before we start, let's lay down some ground rules.

No-one is allowed to say "but that's impossible". You can recreate the entire game with nothing more than a pen, (a lot of) paper, dice and a stop-watch. If you have a digital stopwatch you don't even need the dice.
However, we want to make it as simple and easy to play as possible without changing the mechanics. Paper and pen (or more likely a small wipe-clean board and marker) is a last resort for cases like Lightspawn being buffed to 80HP and so on. I'm aware that other, real TTG/CCGs like MTG have wonderful things like damage counters and indicate status through card orientation and so on. Ideally I'd rather have something more obvious, even if it requires extra gubbins, because I've never played any other games like that and neither has my fiancée.
Finally, we want to make it as cheap as possible. This is going to be horribly expensive and I don't want to declare bankruptcy until I've accumulated enough debt to really hurt the bank. Obviously this is in direct opposition to our second objective, so it will have to be something of a balancing act.

Right, let's get on with it.

First of all, the cards. This is probably the biggest problem - Hearthhead tells us that there are 381 cards. However, even if this is a complete and accurate figure, it's missing the fact that not only do we need duplicates of most of these cards, but we also need a load of extras such as the Whelps spawned by Onyxia and Leeroy and so on. Getting an exact figure for this would require quite a lot of tedious work that I'll do later when I need to procrastinate, but for now let's take a rough guess at 800 cards. I've written to a number of UK printers asking for quotes, but they haven't got back to me yet so for now the only figure I can find online is from a US firm who would do a pack for about £30 (plus £30 shipping). Of course, for a two player game we'd probably want two packs, which sets our running total at around £90. It's probably possible to work this down - I'll know more when the UK printers get back to me - and of course there's always the option of home printing, though that's still expensive and a lot more work. But let's settle at £90 for now.

We probably don't need a board (being the high-flying jet-setter I am, I own a number of tables). However, what we do need are ways to indicate health/status/etc. and this is where things get interesting.

The simplest way of displaying minion health and attack (without resorting to pen and paper) is through dice - just drop a couple on the bottom of each card. A d20 is probably sufficient for the vast majority of cases - if it goes any higher than that I can't think of any good way of indicating it without making a note on our trusty whiteboard. We'd want one for health and attack for each minion, plus an attack die for each hero, a d20 armour die for each hero and possibly a d30 for health (or maybe a d20+d10 or one of those little rule-slider things). You can have a maximum of 7 minions each, so that's a total of 14+14+1+1+2+2=34. Coloured dice would be best, and you can get those of 50p each (plus £5 postage for the whole lot), plus £3 for two d30s, which comes to £25. However, if we're feeling cheap we can get 40 plain white d20s for £12. We also want some way of determining RNG like Arcane Missiles and Mad Bomber so let's take a d16 as well for an extra £1. An alternative method would be to have stacks of numbered tokens that were swapped out, but as this would require over 300 tokens I think I'll stick to dice.

Rough running total: £115.

Next, we want status indicators. As far as I can remember there are three different states that need showing: Divine Shield, Frozen, and Silenced. To cover all options, we'd need 14 yellow counters for DS, 16 blue/white counters for Frozen, and 14 purple counters for Silence. You can get all of those as nice little 4mm wood counters for a total of £7 including UK shipping.

Rough running total: £123.

Finally, we want mana crystals. I'm rather taken by these nice plastic marbleized ones which are 20 for £4. I'm not quite sure how we'd indicate locked/used crystals - probably by painting one side of each crystal black and flipping them.

Rough running total: £127.

I think that's about it. We could add a whiteboard I suppose for keeping track of the occasional oddities, but to be honest you can get away with paper and I have plenty of that. So, what's left?

Getting the card images together. I'd like to get the game files for this before they're reduced to the rubbish quality things shown on Hearthhead and the like, but I don't know where to go. All the data is in protected .unity3d files which I can't get in to (the obfuscator just throws errors).
Finding the best value/quality printers. That's the biggest expense at the moment and reducing it is pretty important to make this viable.
Working out the more involved mechanics. There are lots of these and there are always solutions, but it's a case of finding the simplest and most elegant solutions that require the fewest extra parts.

If anyone out there has better ideas please let me know. I'd like to make this a reality.

~Roxton.

Review: Atlantis

2013-10-09T04:57:00.000-07:00

Atlantis is a new BBC One drama set in the eponymous city. The story, such as it is, follows a young man called Jason who is allegedly a marine archaeologist or somesuch nonsense but runs a profitable side-line smuggling live pigeons inside his pectoral muscles. One day when out looking for his dead father, his submarine gets sucked into a wormhole and he washes up in the mythical city wearing nothing but a novelty necklace and a grimace reminiscent of a particularly unpleasant bowel movement, which he retains for the rest of the program. Whether running for his life, pulling an arrow from his ridiculous bicep, flirting with Ariadne or fondling a young, geeky Pythagoras, he is steadfast in his refusal to exhibit any emotion beyond a kind of pained surprise.

There are many, many, things wrong with this ‘drama’, but the first, and most prominent, is the complete and total inability of anyone involved to act. These days most of the really bad actors seem to have been siphoned off to present daytime quiz shows or into adverts or YouTube, but the BBC is doing its utmost to keep the absolute worst of them in business. Jack Donnelly is the aforementioned muscle-display unit, and I suspect that the intention is to serve him up to mother so that she might watch with the children, in the same way that Amy Pond was given to fathers willing to endure Matt Smith. The least-bad of the lot is Robert Emms as Pythagoras (why he’s there is utterly inexplicable), though that’s mainly due to his having such an amusing face that he doesn’t actually need to act.

It might be a bit unfair to blame the actors, though, because it’s quite possible that they’re actually incredible thespians who simply recognised the unbelievably poor quality of the script and decided to convey their disgust in their performance. While watching I tried to jot down some of the worst blunders, but I was hampered by not wanted to prolong my suffering and pause the video, so what follows is just an entrée to the seven-course banquet of bad writing:

‘If the guards catch him they’ll execute him on sight!’
‘Oh, Jason, only you can bring an end to the people’s fear and suffering.’
‘Who’s that young man?’ asks Ariadne’s mother, having seen Jason sexing up her daughter. Oh, I don’t know, maybe just the guy who killed the minotaur, saved your city, and was honoured in a public ceremony literally seconds earlier AT WHICH YOU WERE PRESENT.

Side note:
Why is ‘that’s none of your concern’ the go-to Ye Olde Subestitutione for ‘none of your business’? I was replaying Skyrim last week and it’s probably the single most repeated line of dialogue in the game after ‘FUS DO RA’. I tried googling it to find out if it’s used anywhere else and all I found was a fanfiction (possibly erotic; I stopped reading) involving the personifications of various Scandinavian countries in WWII experiencing teenage angst.
End of side note.

It’s not just the dialogue that’s bad, though – the story is pretty terrible too. The writers seem to have taken the same approach to Greek mythology that Merlin took to Arthurian legend – creating a completely different world with nominal similarities to the source material, creating your own (stock) characters and choosing names apparently at random from the most familiar words on the relevant Wikipedia page. Quite a lot of foundation-building is done in this episode, most of it in the form of a single massive exposition dump from some character you just instantly know exists only to deliver massive exposition dumps. At least Game of Thrones had the decency to make its narrator-insert a prostitute, so if you were bored you could just get mesmerised by her bouncing nipples (that, at least, was my fiancée's reaction).

Briefly, Jason’s missing father was actually from Atlantis, which isn't so much a lost city as in a parallel universe (original), and for some reason was very important to everyone there, but that actually means that everyone wants to kill Jason (they set lions on him. And a two-headed dragon!) for some reason, and the minotaur to which the city is delivering its yearly tribute is actually just a man cursed by the gods for betraying Jason’s father (apparently bestiality isn’t suitable for children until they reach Twilight age), and then Jason teams up with Pythagoras and his drunk landlord Hercules to form a gang of monster-hunters for hire and oh God I just can’t take it anymore this is just ridiculous.

Another side note (I know that’s two in as many paragraphs but really this is more interesting than the actual program):
We’re told that the city has 20,000 inhabitants, and that the seven unlucky tributes are chosen from them by drawing stones (so far, so accurate). We’re shown three or four people taking stones, and it takes them each about 20 seconds (not counting Jason, who takes ages because he keeps flirting with the woman with the enormous eyebrows). That works out at 400,000 seconds for the lot, which is about four and a half days of constant drawing. Even if only a third of the population actually participate in the draw that’s an absurdly long time. Actually now I think about it there are lots of ways round that, so maybe that was a rather pointless digression.
End of side note.

As the episode went on the comparison to Merlin became stronger and stronger. Like Merlin, it’s obviously meant to be a slightly-campy slightly-amusing slightly-exciting children’s adventure series in a slightly-recognisable setting, but where it fails so catastrophically where Merlin mostly succeeded is in the language. When you have a historic-fantasy setting like this, how your characters speak is important. If it’s too archaic it can be irritating for the audience, but if it’s too modern it feels incongruous and silly. Merlin struck a good balance by shunning obvious modernisms such as ‘ok’ and ‘your mum’, but otherwise preventing the dialogue from drifting much further back than the 1940s, producing a kind of wholesome boys-own-adventure feel which suited the banter between the main characters and the occasional action scene. Every now and then it would drift into Ye Olde Serioussnesse, but that was usually reserved for big speeches or whatnot where it made sense that people would speak more formally. Here, though, we teeter between ‘what pray tell is this?’ and ‘well at least I’m not fat’ on an almost line-ly basis, and the constant gear change between idiocy and glib smugness is somehow worse than either on their own.

Of course, the other thing Merlin had going for it was genuinely likeable characters, who, while not perhaps paragons of rounded development, were at least recognisably human and had moments of sorrow and mirth and interest and were played by real people who could actually act and weren’t chosen simply because of the size of their man-breasts. Even the supremely unpleasant Arthur was better than Atlantis’ evil queen, who slaps her daughter silly with no provocation. I don’t think I can continue with a solid review, so here in brief are a few other things worth noting:

The costumes are as bad as the rest of the show; admittedly it’s hard to make chiton-and-trousers look good, even on someone who’s spent so much time developing their physique, but the nobles’ coloured robes look as though they’ve been bought from Smitthy’s.
The CGI is pretty terrible, but that’s to be expected from the BBC and I don’t hold it against them.
Jason is weirdly fast to accept his new life and lineage. Usually characters in his situation work the other way and refuse to believe that what they’re seeing, eating, stabbing and occasionally sleeping with is real long past the point where it stopped being convincing or not-irritating, but Jason is just a little too quick. I could comment on this representing his self-assurance and scientific rationalism complementing each other, resulting in a complete confidence in the evidence of his senses, but if this series has done anything clever it’s probably by accident.
Oh, the music is terrible as well. DROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE. DROOOOOOOOOOOONE. DROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE.

The worst thing is that it’s just not funny. When something tries to be serious and fails, it’s usually quite amusing, but when something tries to be funny and fails it’s just bad. And that’s what this is. It’s not so-bad-it’s-funny or so-bad-it’s-good, it’s just bad.

Atlantis airs weekly on BBC One at 8.25pm on Saturday, and is available on BBC iPlayer, though why you’d want to watch it is beyond me.

Bootnote:
I suppose the one thing Atlantis has in its favour is that it is, technically, new IP, and the BBC pushing new programming out rather than just airing repeats of series 57 and 89 of Doctor Who and British Bake-Off respectively is something that should be celebrated. The problem is that rather than try something actually new or original they just decided to re-cast Merlin in a less-interesting setting with worse actors and a script pasted together by a committee of howler monkeys from shreds of Jason and the Argonauts fanfiction. The result is that there is insufficient novelty to cover its many failings – though, to be fair, it’s hard to think of anything that could really cover for failings on this monumental scale.

The other excuse is that it’s for children, but I don’t think that really counts either. Ok, so you can probably get away with lowering your standards a bit for the ankle-biters, but not this much. Maybe if you were programming exclusively for those still in the womb, but at that point I’d worry about it harming the child’s development.

Review: Trine 2

2013-10-03T04:18:00.002-07:00

Along with several hundred thousand other people, I picked up Humble Bundle 9 a few weeks ago. Often the case with these bundles is that there's one game you actually want, with the others effectively acting as ricin-free sweeteners. For me, that game was Trine 2, developed by Frozenbyte. I bought the original Trine many years ago and enjoyed it very much. It was a solid, occasionally quirky 2.5D side-scrolling puzzle/action game in which you control a team of three fantasy archetypes trapped in one body by the machinations of some peculiar magical artefact, and could switch between them as you saw fit. Overall the game was a lot of fun, with great effort clearly having been put into the aesthetics, sound and level design. Its quality is further marked by its admittance into the very select list of games that my fiancée actually enjoyed.

However, it wasn't without its problems. Enemy design was repetitive, presumably due to the limitations of a small studio; there was a really obnoxious difficulty curve that was practically horizontal for most of the game before turning into the Cliffs of Insanity for the final level (I'm not sure I ever completed it); and too many puzzles could be completely circumvented by means of stacking crates or having the mage create floating platforms, neither of which is a particularly fun activity. Finally, while there was local co-op (in the sense of buying another keyboard), there wasn't any LAN or IP/TCP support, which was a bit of a problem.

So, how has Trine 2 fared in its attempt to fix the problems of its predecessor?

I ask that question because it's very obviously what Frozenbyte have tried to do. Their approach has been akin to restoring a slightly run-down classic car - new paint, new tyres, maybe do something about the horrendous lack of suspension, but no fundamental changes. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, and to be honest an improved version of the original is what most look for in a sequel.

For those who played Trine, the core mechanics are unchanged. For those who didn't, you control the aforementioned trinity of mage, thief and warrior. The Mage can create crates and planks by drawing on the screen, and can also levitate various other objects. The Thief can shoot and swing on a rope arrow/grappling hook thing, and also shoot normal, boring arrows at ranged targets. The Warrior has a sword and a shield and a hammer, and is mostly useless outside combat. Each of these characters has a separate health pool, meaning that if one dies you can still use the other two to solve the puzzle and get to the next checkpoint that restores all your health.

This is the first way in which the game differentiates itself from the original. In Trine these checkpoints were few and far between, meaning that keeping all your characters alive was often quite challenging. It also meant that all the puzzles had to be solvable by each individual character as the game couldn't rely on your having kept all three, or even two of them alive. In Trine 2 the glowing restitution-of-all-things orbs are every four paces or so, and so all your characters will be at full health all the time. This removes a large part of the fun of the original, which was trying to figure out alternative solutions to a puzzle with a clear solution for a character you'd lost. However, what it does mean is that the puzzles are now a lot more balanced - because they can assume that you always have the Thief, for example, they don't need to make it solvable by stacking crates, which was pretty much the default approach by the end of Trine. It also means that the puzzles can require specific abilities to solve - for example, throwing the Warrior's hammer at some destructible rocks so that the Mage can levitate a barrel out from behind them and stick it on some spikes on the ceiling so that the Thief can hook-shot into it and swing across the gulf.

The downside of this, of course, is that often one feels as though completing the puzzle has involved finding the solution, rather than a solution. Stacking crates was dull, but at least it was individual. It's not so satisfying reaching the end of a segment when there was one (und precisely vun) way in which it could have been done. I have to say, though, that these moments are often illusory. Frequently I'd reach the top of the cliff or whatnot, feeling as though I'd just been following orders, and then looked back at the area below and realised that there were five or six different ways up after all. So maybe those of you with functioning brains will cope with it better than I did.

If you do have a functioning brain, though, you're probably going to be rather bored by the end, because the difficulty curve, once again, is almost perfectly flat. The final boss fight gave me some problems at first, mostly because you had to start from scratch if you died, and because only the Thief and the Warrior were any use and I'd spent most of the game playing as the Mage, but then I realised that there was one of the magical health-restore orbs just off the top of the screen and it was like playing Trivial Pursuits against a toddler.

That's not to say that I didn't get stuck at all - I did - but in most cases this wasn't because the puzzle was particularly difficult but rather because I'd missed some small but vital detail such as a destructible wall or a switch hidden behind some foliage. Once or twice I died from the combat, because enemies continually re-spawned behind me and shot me from off the screen, and also because once the Warrior has died you're really going to struggle as both the Thief and the Mage are rubbish without the right upgrades. Actually that's not fair - I found that simply levitating boxes and dropping them on goblins worked surprisingly well, but against large numbers of opponents you just die too fast to be of use, and later in the game enemies just destroy the boxes before you can hit them.

For the most part, Trine 2's approach to challenge is 'make more of it'. Enemies constantly respawn until you've killed the specified number, and the boss-fights are only difficult because their health pool is Olympic-sized. There was one wonderful moment in the middle of the game where I faced off against a massive fire-demon thing for the first time. It killed the Warrior and Mage with a single hit each, and I ran the Thief away as fast as I could. There was a large pit up ahead, and I fired a hook-shot into a beam, flew into the air and watched the demon run straight into the pit. It was a wonderful, organic moment of play and I enjoyed it immensely. 'Oh, you liked that!', said the game. 'Well, here are five more fire demons, and this time there are no pits. Enjoy!'.

Repetition also makes an unwelcome appearance in the level design. After an introduction sequence showcasing a stunning night-time city-scape reminiscent of Thief 2 and a gorgeous autumnal farm scene, the first half of the game takes place in the same (incredibly beautiful and well-drawn) swamp. Eventually I got tired of this and stopped to make a note, but the game seemed to resent it, and whisked me through a beach, a castle, a fire castle, a poison castle and some kind of ice-scape without giving me a chance to catch my breath or appreciate the levels at all.

What a lovely landscape. Too bad you only see it for 30 seconds.

I know this all sounds very negative, but Trine 2 isn't a bad game. It's very pretty (I really can't stress this enough - the artwork is really first-class), the characters all handle extremely well and the puzzles themselves are lots of fun. The music is good, though not as good as the original (partly because the levels are too long and so there's just too much repetition). The writing is laughably bad, though I suppose it's above average for most games. Enemy design is still repetitive, with goblins replacing Trine's skeletons as the default mook, but some effort has been made to introduce variety, with giant spiders and crabs and the aforementioned fire demon things making occasional appearances. The talent trees are now a bit more developed, with some particularly fun abilities including the Mage being able to magnetise metal objects and the Warrior flying with his shield. And new mechanics have been introduced for the puzzles, such as fluid physics and diverting fire and wind by means of pipes. And there is now proper multiplayer support, which is probably the single biggest improvement over the original.

Ultimately, Trine 2 just isn't as focused as Trine. The levels are too long, too easy and with too little variation to keep me hooked. With the original I was constantly succumbing to the just-one-more-level bug, and would often sneak ahead of my finanée, playing a level alone and then replaying it in co-op. With Trine 2 I frequently stopped playing out of boredom or annoyance. If you haven't played either, get the original and then stop. If you played the original and want more, then just replay it. I guarantee you'll enjoy it more than this.

Trine 2 is developed by Frozenbyte and is available on Steam and elsewhere for about £13.

First class is in

2013-09-17T03:13:00.000-07:00

So, yes, I've been a bit lax on the updates, but that's ok because no-one is reading this anyway. Anyway, the game is coming along well. The Mage class is now fully implemented, and I'm about to start work on the next - the Rogue. Currently the only game mode is Hot Seat, but I've been playing a few games and I'm pretty happy. Obviously with only one class, and with only one player per team it's not particularly gripping, but it's enough to check the basic mechanics and get an idea for how the plays I had in my mind actually work. There's a lot of tweaking of numbers to do as balance isn't quite right yet, but it's getting there.

The eventual plan is to have the main game be a team-based tactical arena - two teams of three, with each team controlled by one player - and so ultimately balance will revolve around that - but I dislike the idea of hand-waving away problems in 1v1 by claiming that teams fix it all. Obviously if there's no other solution I'll take it, but I'd rather have deep balance that runs all the way down.

The biggest problem at the moment is the lack of art. Most of this is just a cosmetic issue - changing sprites and icons and so on - but things such as spell effects and animations do require some underlying code. I would release an alpha as it is, but currently the art that's not from MS Paint is from other games and while I don't mind a pre-release containing placeholder assets I don't want it containing other people's work. As soon as I have a stable, non-copyrighted demo I'll let people have it.

~Roxton.

How did Sherlock live?

2013-09-05T10:30:00.002-07:00

I've recently started watching the BBC's rather good New Tricks, in which a bunch of retired policemen solve old, unclosed cases. I've decided to do something rather similar - solve an old (by internet standards), unclosed BBC case. Namely, how did Sherlock survive the fall from the roof of St. Bartholomew's Hospital? In doing so, I'm either fashionably late to the discussion, or perhaps just an avant-garde of the inevitable renewal that will come ahead of Series 3 being released at some point in the relatively near future.

Before I begin speculating wildly, though, we probably ought to work out just what happened. I'm starting my description at what on my DVD is about 1:18:07, when Moriarty has just topped himself and Sherlock is spinning around in circles chasing his sleeve. Or something.

1:18:11: Sherlock spins around. Shot of Moriarty with blood surrounding his head. LENS FLARE.

1:18:15: Music reaches climax and goes quiet. We see a foot (Sherlock's shoe) stepping onto the edge of the parapet.

1:18:24: Sherlock's face comes into view and he looks down. Change camera to see him from below the building, swaying on the edge with his arms by his sides.

1:18:29: Cut to Watson arriving in a cab, having completed a half-hour round trip in about half that time.

1:18:32: Another foot shot with the cab pulling up below. Beep of a mobile phone and a call starts to Watson. Watson gets out of cab and starts walking away from hospital.

1:18:46: 'John, turn around and come back the way you came. [...] Ok look up I'm on the rooftop'.

1:18:57: Shot of Sherlock on the roof, hand to head, presumably holding phone. Watson is in frame looking up.

1:19:05: Shot of Sherlock's face and torso; he's actually on the phone and talking. He starts his 'apology'.

1:19:15: Sherlock starts his confession. Presumably it's fake, unless the BBC is planning on the biggest plot twist of all time. No new camera angles during this; just close-ups of Watson, Sherlock's head and Moriarty's corpse. One shot from below as we saw at 1:18:57. It looks as thought Sherlock is looking down at Watson and he's looking back.

1:20:28: 'No, stay exactly where you are. Don't move!'. Watson does as he's told.

1:20:34: Side close shot of Sherlock holding out his left arm and crying. Right hand is still holding iPhone to his head. 'Keep your eyes fixed on me', he says.

1:20:52: Another shot from below showing him on the edge. His left arm is by his side but he's had a lot of time to lower it. He's definitely looking straight ahead.

1:20:58: 'Good bye, John'.

1:21:01: Face shot of Cumberbatch doing turtle impression. Eyes are down but head is forward.

1:21:05: Shot from between Sherlock's legs (hello ladies) of John. Camera blurs constantly; they probably ought to fix that.

1:21:06: LOUD MUSIC. Shot of Sherlock on ledge from behind lowering his arm.

1:21:09: He tosses phone away. Hope he hung up first or his next of kin is going to have a massive phone bill.

1:21:10: Side shot of turtlebatch again.

1:21:14: Here we go. Arms out, SWAN DIVE INTO THE BEST NIGHT OF YOUR LIFE.

1:21:15: Shot of him falling, arms out, feel flailing.

1:21:16: Cut to John staring up.

1:21:18: Back to him falling, arms flailing again. Hard to tell if he's moving them deliberately.

1:21:19: New angle of him falling from directly below. Definitely seems to be spinning his arms.

1:21:21: He falls out of frame.

1:21:21: Side shot of body hitting pavement. Rolls slightly.

1:21:23: Immediate cut to Watson looking shocked. He starts running. Cyclist behind him.

1:21:32: We see what is presumably meant to be John's view, of Sherlock lying on his side behind a bin collection truck.

1:21:33: Cyclist knocks over John, apparently deliberately because not even London cyclists are that bad. Don't recognise cyclist's face.

1:21:38: John lies around like the lemon he is.

1:21:39: Sherlock lying still on his side, shot from above this time. Crowd is beginning to gather. Bin bag lorry pulls away. Two female brunette nurses/doctors in the blue tops. Can't see their faces.

1:21:51: Constant cuts between John lying face down on the road and Sherlock lying face down on the pavement. They're so connected. Sherlock's winning on the blood count, though. We get a brief glimpse of one of the doctors - I don't think it's Molly.

1:22:10: Back of Sherlock's head, from John's perspective. Lots of blood. Clear shots of both doctors. Neither are Molly. Sad music.

1:22:20: Someone's taking Sherlock's pulse on the right wrist, but another hand with a silver watch and gold ring keeps interfering.

1:22:29: Oh, it was John taking the pulse.

1:22:35: Stretcher arrives; they're rolling him over. Lots and lots of blood. Oddly enough he seems to have been injured on the left ear - not the side he landed on.

1:22:45: Dead upside down Sherlock face. Eyes are still open.

1:22:54: Aerial shot of Sherlock being lifted onto the stretcher. Arms hanging over the edge.

1:23:08: Sherlock being wheeled into the hospital.

Nothing but sad John face from then on.

1:23:25: Oh wait, sniper vision on John's head. Moves up and away. Hitman is removing gun. Shows that he was opposite the hospital and presumably had a perfect view of the fall. Obviously he's taken in by it or John would be dead.

1:23:34: But now we can see out of the sniper's window and it's obvious that he wasn't facing John at all because he's looking out onto a flat brick wall with trees behind it, not the grey/white stone of the hospital. I think this is a mistake rather than a clue - presumably they couldn't actually shoot in the building opposite for whatever reason so just did it somewhere else and hoped nobody would notice. WELL I DID. Honestly, what do we pay the licensing fee for?

1:23:44: Cut to Sun headline. World definitely believes he's dead.

Ok, that was pretty exhausting.. But I think it was necessary, for reasons we'll come to later.

Taking what we have seen as being true (it may not be), there are really only three possibilities of solution:

1) He didn't fall.

Moffat is pretty fond of the whole 'I'm actually a duplicate' gag, as is demonstrated by every goddam episode of Doctor Who. Seriously, give it a rest. Here it's more-or-less convincing. He's had a whole night in a hospital with the help of Molly to prepare, and we know he has access to the morgue from the very first time we see him. So, possibilities:

1a) A corpse (mocked up to look like Sherlock) fell and was collected and carried away

1b) A dummy fell and was carried away (unlikely)

1c) A dummy fell and was replaced at the bottom somehow by Sherlock or a corpse, who was carried away (unnecessarily convoluted)

The 'somehow' in 1c would of course the be bin truck, which will feature more prominently later on.

The main objection to this set of theories is that we do, apparently, see him jump. I stress 'apparently', because it's quite possible that the jump we see is actually off a different bit of roof and he falls two feet and lands on a balcony or something, while Molly pushes the dummy/corpse off where John can see it. Supporting this is the fact that we never actually see the Sherlock on the rooftop - that is, the Sherlock that John sees - move when it's from John's perspective. He transitions briefly from both arms down to one arm on the phone but John's not actually looking at him when that happens, and we can't see his jaw moving either when he's talking (one can't really tell at that distance - that's the point). It's quite possible that the whole thing is being held there by Molly/Sherlock and is then dropped. But what about identification, you ask. Well, we saw in A Scandal in Belgravia that Sherlock is quite practised at faking corpses - he certainly manages to fool Mycroft, who would presumably be the highest hurdle.

It's raining men

The other objection is that Sherlock's arms do seem to move of his own volition in the air, which implies that he's alive when he jumps and not a duplicate corpse. It's very briefly shown and it's possible that corpses do just fall like that if they're given the right push, but it opens up one last possibility in this chunk:

1d) Sherlock's child-snatching doppelgänger fell and died on impact

We know from the girl's reaction that the person who kidnapped her looked like Sherlock - that's the whole point of Moriarty's plan. It could well be they just got a tall, dark haired person in that coat and scarf to do it, and that's a perfectly plausible explanation, but there could be a more accurate duplicate out there somewhere, and it's possible that Sherlock somehow gets him onto the roof and pushes him (DNA/tooth record tampering would accompany this, of course). This would be an extremely dark solution but definitely a logical one, and one which has the advantage of not introducing any new elements. Of course, it could also be that the duplicate is already dead on Moriarty's orders and is used as the corpse in (1a). This is probably my preferred solution as it's clever and self-referential without being needlessly dark and vicious.

2) He fell, and survived.

If we take the movement of the arms as signs of life, and we don't want to turn Sherlock into a murderer (I know he's killed people before, but not in quite such a cold-blooded way), then this is the other option. It is, I think, the current preferred solution of the internet hivemind and has been hinted to by Moffat in an interview (look it up, I can't be bothered to find the link). There's only one way we can really explain it, and that's the rubbish lorry.

2a) Sherlock lands on the bin bags and rolls off (through a six-foot high fence).

It's not seen at all before the jump, and it pulls away immediately afterwards, so it's possible that Sherlock landed in it (presumably by arrangement) and then hopped out and played possum. The blood is either prepared or genuine (that's still a long fall, no matter what on to) and Watson was either prevented from taking the pulse properly by the bystanders or Sherlock used the old rubber-ball-in-the-armpit trick to cut off circulation. How he got out of the hospital is unclear but it doesn't really matter, I suppose. It wouldn't exactly be difficult, especially if you had Molly to help.

Now, the problem with this is that there is no way that John or the sniper (it's not just John that Sherlock has to fool, remember) could have missed this. People point out that cyclist knocked him over, but look at the timeline above - that didn't happen until well after the impact. And presumably there wasn't anything distracting the sniper. However...

2b) The lorry blocks the trampoline/thing that really breaks Sherlock's fall.

However, it is possible that while the lorry itself didn't break the fall, it acted as a convenient cover for what did. A large mattress or one of those fireman trampolines - the lorry pulled up, people got the thing out, Sherlock landed on it, they rolled him off, they put it away and drove off. Unlikely that they could have done that without the sniper or John seeing, especially as it's hardly a full lorry (look at it), but it's certainly possible. And the lorry definitely blocks John's view, as that screenshot above is part of a shot which swings around the back of the lorry to show the 'corpse'. Yes, Sherlock probably wouldn't have survived unscathed, but that's not the point - he just has to live. While this is something of an inelegant solution, it's not a terribly far-fetched one and requires Sherlock to do much less legwork than he would have to otherwise. I rank it just as likely as the doppelgänger. This would also explain Sherlock's insistence on Watson's exact position (where he won't be able to see), and also why the cyclist (employed by Sherlock of course) had to knock him over - so that he couldn't run up and see the trampoline. Presumably no one else was watching, and it's a fair assumption. Also explains why the bin lorry pulls off so fast - I think most people in that situation would get out and try and help. It's still a massive risk, though - I don't think Sherlock could have known where the sniper was and so what his line-of-sight would be, and if one person happened to be looking the wrong way then the whole game is up.

Oh, I suppose it's worth mentioning:

2c) There was no trickery, Sherlock just survived by virtue of amazing luck/physical resilience. People have survived falls from higher. But I think that's a pretty rubbish solution and if that's what they've picked I'll be very disappointed.

Now, those are the two 'fair' solutions - that is, solutions that match with the evidence presented. But there is another possibility.

3) The camera lied.

Now, obviously the camera has lied by omission, because if the sequence above represents the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then Sherlock is dead. What I mean is that the camera has deliberately shown something that didn't happen. To some degree this is necessary for solution (1), because we see Sherlock jump off something, but that's not too much of a stretch. Again, there are two options.

3a) John's point-of-view shots were what he thought he saw, not what he actually saw.

There are a handful of camera angles in the clip that are definitely meant to be what John is seeing (the screenshot above being one of them). It could be that John is just getting confused, or the H.O.U.N.D. toxin from the previous episode is playing up in his system, or the cyclist's knock to the head has muddled his memory. This might allow some trickery with small aspects of the shot, but remember that Sherlock still has to fool both the sniper and the rest of the world.

3b) There was some other lie in the shot.

Well if that's the case then there's no point speculating. Can't make bricks without clay.

Well, there we have it. The most likely solutions are an emergency fireman's trampoline, hidden by the bin lorry, or a duplicate, possibly the child snatcher, being dropped in Sherlock's place. Once Series 3 comes out I suppose we'll know which.

If you have any other ideas or holes in my logic, drop them below.

~Roxton.

Review: Kingdom Rush

2013-08-26T12:47:00.000-07:00

This review was conducted on a Samsung Galaxy SIII running Android 4.1.2.

Kingdom Rush is a fantasy tower-defence game for Android. No, wait, come back. I know we've seen a lot of these, but really, it's rather good. It's not original in any way, but it's got great artwork, doesn't take itself too seriously, and, most importantly, it understands its platform (but more on that later).

By now explaining the mechanics of a tower defence game is perhaps a bit unnecessary - we all know the rules, as Paxman might say - but it's probably worth pinning down the game's idiosyncrasies. KR eschews ideas of mazing (that is, placing towers freely in such a way that the enemies must take a longer path to navigate around them) and instead opts for pre-set paths and tower positions. There are four such towers: archers, who fire rapidly but do small amounts of physical damage; mages, who fire slowly but do large amounts of magical damage; artillery, which does large amounts of area-of-effect physical damage; and barracks, which produce hapless troops sent out to engage and slow the invaders. Each of these towers can be built and upgraded a number of times with gold picked from the pockets of fallen foes (automatically, mind - no Plants vs Zombies coin-clicking). At the highest upgrade level, you can choose one of two final destinations into which your tower can morph - for example, the barracks can become either a temple producing durable paladins, or a hut producing high-damage barbarians. Each of these final-level upgrades have themselves a number of abilities that must be unlocked for each tower - instantly disintegrating an enemy, for instance, or a large-area carpet bomb. While these additions (eight towers and around sixteen abilities) are hardly overwhelming in their complexity, they're enough to keep the levels lively and avoid the needless over-complication often seen in games with a more dizzying variety of towers.

The opening phases of an early level. Note the two enemy spawn points and pre-set tower locations.

To keep things moderately fresh, you also have access to two other abilities which are independent of the towers. The first of these summons two conscripted reinforcements who act like the troops produced by the barracks - engaging two enemy creeps in hand-to-hand combat and thus slowing their progress along the route. The cooldown on this ability is short (about 10 seconds), meaning that it has a variety of uses such as reinforcing an overwhelmed barracks (enemies who don't have anyone to fight just run straight on), splitting up or stalling a group early on in their run, or in an emergency acting as a reserve guard against the Mob Who Got Away. The other ability calls down a rain of fire on the targeted location - effectively a panic button with a cooldown long enough to prevent it from becoming part of a strategy.

Finally, you have control of a hero unit, though 'control' perhaps implies more than there is. Basically, you can order them to move to a particular point, where they act just like the reinforcements or barrack troops. They have special abilities such as area damage or healing but use these automatically, meaning that outside of a quick retreat to cut off an escaping enemy they're pretty much set-and-forget. I get the feeling that perhaps there was meant to be a bit more to the heroes - they have an experience and levelling system, and there's a large number of them, each with different artwork and stats and abilities - but that the extra functionality was removed for some reason.

If that's true, then it's a shame for Ironhide (the developers), because it's one of the two things they chose to monetise in addition to the base price of the game (£1.30), and there's absolutely no reason to ever buy them (well, even less reason than usual for in-app purchases, I mean). They're certainly not necessary for completion, though they might make it easier.

£3.20 for what is effectively a skin is really quite cheeky in a paid-for game.

The other area they've tried to get you to pay for is in gems. These are dropped by creatures in the game when they die, and can be used to buy powerful one-off items, such as an ice wand that freezes all enemies on screen, or dynamite to throw at individual enemies. Again, it's quite unnecessary to ever buy them, as not only are the items themselves mostly pointless (I've had to use maybe three in total on the harder challenge modes) but you get such an abundance of gems from playing through the campaign levels that you could buy ten or twenty of every item and still not even notice that you'd spent anything. I suspect that this is deliberate, and I applaud the decision - as it stands, choosing to use the gem or hero store has only a cosmetic impact on gameplay, and is effectively a nice way of tipping the developers extra for making a game you enjoy. If you don't want to pay more for a game you already own, it's kept out of the way where it will never disturb you.

But back to the game. There's a campaign mode, with a story which consists of a single sentence on the loading screen of each mission and is so dull and tired that I've already given it too much mention. Going along the campaign unlocks the various towers and heroes that you don't have to pay for, as well as a number of more challenging side-missions. Completion of each level awards one, two or three stars, depending on performance, and these stars not only act as a 100%-completion-drive-in-lieu-of-real-replayability (thanks, Angry Birds), but can also be used to buy various upgrades for the towers and abilities you already have. These range from the basic such as reduced in-game upgrade costs and increased damage to new passive effects, such as magic attacks also slowing the target or reinforcements gaining a ranged attack. You can reset these for no cost and reassign them at will, which is something I often found myself doing to get through a tough level. Each level also has two additional modes you can attempt having completed it in the story: a tougher version of the story mode, and an 'elite' version in which certain towers or abilities are denied to you. Completing each of these gives you an extra star, meaning that in theory if one hit a tough level one could go back and upgrade sufficiently to beat it.

The upgrade shop, with everything unlocked

The levels themselves are wonderful. I'm personally a sucker for the nice bright colours and cartoon-y style (recovering WoW addict, remember), and there's a wide range of locales and a wider range of enemies who all have different abilities, strengths and weaknesses. Occasionally you'll come across a Big Bad Boss who disables your towers unless you engage in a silly little quick-time event, but most of the time you'll be free to plan your next move without such distractions.

That's not to say that you'll be completely passive - you'll want to use that 10-second reinforcement ability as much as you can, and the enemies come at such a pace that you're never far off upgrading or building something new. The level of engagement is more-or-less perfect for a mobile device: sufficient - more than sufficient - to pass the time on a bus or train or tube, but not so demanding that you can't look up and check the next stop. This is what I meant by Ironhide 'understanding the platform'. They know when and why people are playing games on their phones and have built something to fill that gap.

They also show an admirable understanding of what the human finger can easily do. The menu system for each tower is simple, intuitive and clever. You tap once to open a little ring-menu around the tower in question, tap on the option you want and then again to confirm, thus preventing a jolt or just fumbling fingers causing precision problems on smaller screens. Compared to the interfaces in many touch-screen games it's superb.

However, it's not all good news. While for the most part the simple mechanics aren't so simple as to be boring, the game isn't terribly well balanced. With the exception of a couple of challenge modes where all other options were removed, I never once found myself needing to use archers - almost all levels could be beaten by alternating a large number of artillery and mage towers, and some even just by stacking mage towers. In theory this shouldn't be possible because the various resistances to physical or magic damage of the different enemies means that you should need a variety of towers, as should the existence of flying enemies, but artillery is simply so much better than archers (though admittedly more expensive) that there's never any need to replace it. Oh, it can't hit the occasional flying opponent, but if you've dropped a few mages in that won't be an issue in any case.

Furthermore, I found myself suffering a fair few technical issues. No matter how many times I disabled the in-game sound and music (I have yet to find a mobile game with good enough music to merit the hassle of finding, untangling and wearing headphones), it was always enabled again whenever I started the game, occasionally drawing a few disapproving looks when I opened it on public transport and inflicted a few seconds of rubbishy 'epic' music on my fellow travellers. And I had to open it far more than I would like given its penchant for occasionally force-closing between levels (never during one, thankfully). In fact it's a bit of a resource-hog all round: if I didn't force-close every other running app, and clear them from the RAM, it tended to drop frames at an alarming rate. It's not as though I have an awful phone, either - I haven't tested this on older or mid-range devices but it might be worth keeping an eye on that refund timer if you can. Finally, if for some reason I did have to alt-tab out mid level (you know what I mean!) it would often restart the whole app when I switched back to it, destroying my progress. This is Not Good when the longer levels are around ten minutes long.

In fairness, the screen does get quite busy towards the end of levels, but it really should have been fixed.

None of that seriously damaged my having fun with the game, though - it was a minor annoyance at worst. The mechanics are simple enough that even a complete newcomer to the tower defence genre could pick it up instantly, but have sufficient depth to engage for a surprisingly long time. The artwork is also excellent for a mobile game, and due to its lo-fi nature will look great on devices regardless of resolution. For me this went beyond 'game I play on the bus' and became 'game I'll play when I have other, better things to do'. That's probably not necessarily true of everyone though - I enjoy tower defence more than most, I think.

Kingdom Rush is developed by Ironhide Game Studio and is available on Google Play for £1.30.

First Impressions: Sir, You Are Being Hunted

2013-08-22T05:33:00.002-07:00

While this may carry a review tag, it's not really. Because, you see, Sir, You Are Being Hunted is currently in pay-to-enter pre-release alpha. So everything written below will probably be irrelevant before too long, much like everything else I write.

I'm sprinting through the Fens, clutching a stolen shotgun and carrying a rucksack full of tea and chocolate biscuits. I approach a rusting fishing boat lying on its side and clamber aboard to ransack the tiny cabin. Two dead rats, a lump of stilton and a bag of mints. I haven't eaten for a while so I start with the stilton and finish with the mints, in case I meet someone I'd prefer not to suffocate. I leave the rats and take the opportunity to look around me.

It's a grim Norfolk morning and the rising mist means I can't see far. Just on the edge of my vision there's a cluster of cottages so I head off, running at full speed through the long grass. I can't shake the feeling that something's not quite right. It looks like Norfolk, but there's a sense of unease and sadness - more so than usual, I mean - and every so often I see a ball of blue light flit away over the marshes. I round the corner of the cottages and run straight into a group of murderous robot gamekeepers dressed in tweed and sporting shotguns of their own. Ah. Definitely not Norfolk. They've all got the right number of limbs.

I'm now definitely dead so I suppose this is the time to explain just what's going on. Sir, You Are Being Hunted is a survival/exploration game in a procedurally generated landscape. Just who you are and what you are doing is something of a mystery. There's a brief hand-drawn introduction in which we hear something about an experiment gone wrong and needing to collect a set of McGuffins to escape the islands while evading the robot gentry who are hunting you down, but almost nothing about the player character is revealed. From the clues available (swimming as fast as I run, can breathe underwater, cast no shadow) I assume I'm some kind of fish-vampire. Like those ones in Doctor Who.

So those robots are pretty justified in trying to kill me, then.

Doctor Who is perhaps a good place to begin, because, like that venerable show, this game is Relentlessly British. To be honest, this is actually something that worried me when I heard about it. So many attempts to be 'British' produce abominations like Tardis teapots or Union Flag bow ties (or just bow ties in general). It's the kind of mistake made by foreigners and advertisers with demographic classification charts instead of souls and teenagers searching for a stereotyped identity. Thankfully, however, Big Robot have realised that the most British quality of all is perhaps restraint, and the tone is absolutely perfect. Oh, there's tweed and top hats and pipes and so on, but it's all done so gently - the kind of implementation that leads to a quiet chuckle rather than a forced, wincing smile - that it's never allowed to get in the way of the game. It's there in the small things, such as a 'flask of lukewarm tea' being the most restorative drink, and chocolate biscuits and jars of marmalade being the most common foodstuffs.

Of course, the most British thing about the game is the landscape. The team behind the game have clearly taken great care in producing their British Countryside Generator, and the results are superb. There was one village in particular I was almost certain I'd actually visited a few summers ago, and the general feel of the countryside is uncanny in its accuracy. The generator creates a set of five islands, giving you a choice of biome for each. For now there are only three: Mountain, reminiscent of Wales and parts of Scotland; Fen, which is as it sounds; and Rural, a desolate northern landscape. More biomes are apparently planned (including one massive castle-island), which is good because I'd like to see something that better represents the south (particularly the south-east), though I appreciate that the cosy gardens-and-orchards nature of Kent is perhaps slightly at odds with the bleak, desolate feel created by the rest of the game.

The Fens

If I've been talking a lot about the 'feel' of the game so far, that's because it's what has struck me the most. However, I probably ought to mention the mechanics. There's the basic set of controls (WASD, sprint, crouch, jump) and two resource bars: health and vitality. Vitality constantly drops, though slowly, and can be replenished by eating or drinking scavenged food. As previously mentioned, tea will fully restore vitality, and other foods by a lesser amount. If vitality reaches 0 it is assumed that you starve to death, which means that you have to make incursions into housed (and frequently patrolled) areas to search for food. Your health cannot be artificially restored - it regenerates (very slowly) if you have high vitality - and bandages, which are fashioned from scavenged cloth, are only used to prevent bleeding (which causes your health to drop constantly until a bandage is applied). Some foods, such as dead rats and mouldy bread, will actually reduce your vitality (as does smoking a pipe - very health conscious), and others, such as toadstools or whiskey, will restore it but apply some other negative effect (drunkenness, mostly). You can also find (and apparently catch, though I haven't seen that yet) game, and cook it over fires if you have the matches and don't mind the flames and smoke acting as an instant ideolocator for every robot on the island. Doing so rewards you with cooked meat, which has the double benefit of being highly nutritious and very small.

The size of these things is important, because Sir employs the revered practice of inventory tetris. In addition to your bulky binoculars, you must find room for a variety of weapons such as revolvers and shotguns, which can be found in houses and on the remains of slain robots, ammunition for those weapons, traps, pliers to free yourself from traps, rags for bandages, matches, rocks and bottles for distractions, an axe as a melee weapon, and, of course, food. The space is limited, which forces you to have to make choices about what you can carry, and prevents the game from becoming a Skyrim-esque exercise in hoarding. You can, however, use the houses to stash whatever you like. This is particularly important because none of these objects exist outside the inventory windows, so if you discard something you can't see it fall and then pick it back up.

You can't actually enter the houses, the reasons for which are explained in a long and rather defensive post by the developers, but to be honest being forced out into the countryside is a big part of the game, and I think being able to hide in houses rather than outside would ruin it. Hiding's a big part of the game because of how hard it is to kill the large numbers of robots, and as in Thief there's a visibility meter, which is modified by stance, speed and vegetation. Most of the stealth comes either from line-of-sight or from hiding in long grass. As far as I can tell shadows have nothing to do with it. There is a day/night cycle, though I think it's mostly cosmetic and it passes a little too quickly for my liking.

Sound is another big part of the game. Again, like Thief, being able to hear the sounds of your opponents is crucial, though, unlike Thief, the robots' intentions are indicated by beeps and whistles rather than proposed trips to the bear pits, with a nice little MIDI sequence replacing 'guess it was nothing'. This is more important than it you might think, because the thick vegetation and the fact that half your time is spent squatting in reeds means that often you'll hear the robots before you see them.

The robots themselves are a joy, strutting mechanically along, smoking their (electronic?) cigars. As was previously mentioned, combat is a challenge, but an achievable one. At close range you can normally kill the common gentry hunters with one or two shotgun rounds, or a few more revolver shots, but large groups are best avoided and I was only able to get my first kill after finding one having a quite smoke alone. At long range they lead their shots in a fairly realistic way (they don't realise that they have hitscan weapons), so zig-zagging actually works when you're running away. The best thing about them, though, is the AI. It's not tremendously clever but it's far in advance of the industry standard. If they have pre-set patrol routes they're complicated enough that I couldn't tell what they were - no waiting here for them to walk down a corridor, stand for five seconds, and then turn and head back. Instead, they roam the island looking for you, reacting to noise and other indicators such as smoke from fires and searching from your last known location. This can be used to your advantage - lighting a fire will cause nearby robots to come and search near it, drawing them away from their location, and stones and empty bottles can be thrown to create distractions.

Should all that fail and you die (this will happen a lot), you'll be returned to your last save point. The problem is that you can only save at the boats connecting the islands. Now, I can see the reasoning behind this. Being deprived of a quick-save makes the game infinitely more tense, because having your past achievements removed is a Big Deal and makes you want to protect them. It also makes experimentation risky and meaningful rather than something you do on a whim. And of course it's not as though you can't simply get back into the water and swim around the island until you hit the boat to save again - much like games that require you to close to save, it's a time-penalty more than anything else. The feeling of having collected my first device fragment and trying to sneak back across the island to save was simply fantastic. I'm just a little concerned that the motivation should come from an external, meta-game source such as wanting to save, rather than an in-game one. But I admit that I can't think of anything better.

There are of course other problems, most of which are related to the game's alpha status. Vitality, for example, appears to decrease at a constant rate regardless of activity, and while I do appreciate the ability to sprint for more than a few seconds (Deus Ex:HR, I'm looking at you here), being able to do so indefinitely with no penalty is a little odd and makes simply running to the coast a boring but reliable way to escape from the hunters. Possibly the default rate could be slowed and then increased while running or swimming (oh, and that's another thing - again, swimming not being painfully slow is nice, but it really shouldn't be as fast as running, simply going around the coast becomes too tempting in a game where safety is given such a high priority by the save system.) It would also be rather nice if having the inventory screen open didn't prevent you from doing anything else - if I can sprint at full speed while using a pair of binoculars, I'm sure I can move while eating a biscuit, and having something to do on the long runs through the empty bits would be nice.

There are also some odd performance constraints. It's not a terribly hi-fidelity game (though it is often quite beautiful), but my PC, which is a fairly sturdy beast, got noticeably hot under the collar about the whole affair and there are occasions, particularly moving with binoculars, in which the frame rate noticeably drops. As with the other issues, I expect it'll be touched up before release. There are also no audio options, which is odd.

Don't let that put you off, though. The game's available in alpha for just under £13, which is an absolute bargain. It's by far the most absorbing and engaging single-player games I've played for a couple of years at least, and has the potential to approach Thief levels of immersion. The part of my brain which manages my English Literature degree is trying to work something out concerning the class aspects of the game (I've seen people refer to the hunters as 'torybots', and the apparently 'middle class' squire-bot being perfectly peaceful until you disturb his property is interesting), but I'm going to reserve judgement until I can see the final product. To be honest I hope that they don't try anything along those lines - hardly anyone on the left seems to understand rural politics - but if anyone can manage it, it's these chaps.

So, go and get it.

~Roxton.

Class Reveal #1: Mage

2013-08-12T13:06:00.000-07:00

I think it's time to start rolling out the class abilities. This week it's the Mage, a physically weak spell caster with an arsenal of ranged attacks and a tiny health-pool which demands that the player avoid damage wherever possible. What I'll be doing here is providing an annotated run-down of the character sheet (comments are shown C-style), and a short discussion below.

Mage

Base health: 50 //Of course this number is basically meaningless, but it’s low, comparatively. Other classes will have more than double this figure.

Base speed: 3 //This is the standard number of moves per turn. Some classes will have more but I don’t intend on any having fewer.

Armour: None //I’m not sure I actually want armour in the game; it’s not fully fleshed-out as an idea yet and it’s certainly not important for the Mage

//Each class has a set of six core abilities, and then another six which can each be chosen from a pool of three talents. Here are the core six for the mage.

Frostbolt: Fires a ball of frost at the target, dealing a large amount of damage and slowing their movement slightly for five turns (2 turn cast, no cooldown, long range, Frost school). //While casting a multi-cast ability such as Frostbolt the player must stand still and not use any other abilities. Casts can be interrupted with various consequences.

Fireball: Fires a great ball of fire at the target, dealing a large amount of damage and burning them a little every turn for five turns (2 turn cast, no cooldown, long range, Fire school). //Casting is difficult and time-consuming and so should be rewarded by large damage and bonus effects such as the damage-over-time (DoT) on this one.

Blink: Teleports the caster to the chosen location, removing all stuns and roots (instant cast, medium range, 15 turn cooldown, Arcane school). //This is the Mage’s most versatile escape tool and has a variety of uses. Obviously can be used while stunned.

Frost Nova: Freezes all enemies within a short distance of the caster for five turns and deals a small amount of damage. While frozen, targets are rooted in place and cannot move, but can use abilities. Any direct damage will break the effect. (Instant cast, short range, 15 turn cooldown) //A melee-range move seems odd for a caster, but is of course necessary for the caster to be able to stay at range. Keeping it short range prevents it being used and preventing anyone ever getting close enough to the Mage to do damage. Direct damage means things like Fire Blast where the damage is directly dealt by an ability, as opposed to the burn component of Fireball.

Fire Blast: Blasts the target for a medium amount of damage (Instant cast, medium range, 8 turn cooldown, Fire school). //Instant cast spells are useful for casting while moving

Counterspell: Interrupts the target’s casting, stopping their cast and preventing them from casting any spell in that school for five turns. (Instant cast, 20 turn cooldown, medium range, Arcane) //Originally this had a short silence component attached to it, but I’m really not happy with it being that powerful. It’s the kind of thing that could possibly be added by talents or a larger wild-card system (more on that later)

That’s it for the core abilities. Now we go into the talent tree. One ability is chosen in each tier.

Tier 1:

Deep Freeze: Imprison the target in a block of ice, stunning and freezing them for three turns. While stunned the target cannot move or use most abilities. Can only be cast on a frozen target. (Instant cast, medium range, 20 turn cooldown, Frost). //I’m not entirely happy with such a long stun, but it is rather difficult to pull off considering that the Mage only has one freeze (two with Frostbite) so it should probably be rewarded.

Impact (passive): Fire Blast now stuns the target for 1 round. //Fairly simple – not as powerful as Deep Freeze but much more reliable.

Polymorph: Turn your opponent into a sheep (or even a newt) for five turns. While transformed they cannot move or use most abilities, but regenerate 10% of their health every turn. Any direct damage done will break the effect. (1 turn cast, medium range, no cooldown, Arcane) //Again, I’m not entirely happy with this level of control, even though it has its downsides. This is part of a larger subject I’ll come on to in a bit.

Tier 2:

Cold Wave: Emit a blast of cold air which chills all targets near the caster, dealing a little damage and severely reducing their movement speed for five turns. (Instant cast, short range, 8 turn cooldown, Frost) //A replacement for Frost Nova when it’s on cooldown for Mages under heavy pressure by melee attackers

Incandescence: Burn fiercely bright for an instant, blinding all targets within a short range for three turns. While blinded players cannot move or use most abilities, but receiving any direct damage will end the effect. (Instant cast, short range, 15 turn cooldown, Fire) //Again, a short-range defensive ability to help with an escape

Slow: Burden a target with arcane shackles, slowing their movement speed and increasing the time it takes them to cast spells. (Instant cast, long range, no cooldown, Arcane) //I’m not happy with this at all. I might replace this with Polymorph, which feels a little out of place in Tier 1, and then put a Counterspell silence there, or possibly something completely new.

Tier 3:

Ice Lance: Shoots an icicle at the target, dealing a small amount of damage. If used against a frozen target the damage done is tripled. (Instant cast, long range, no cooldown, Frost) //I always felt the original Ice Lance was one of WoW’s best mechanics, so I’ve stolen it.

Combustion: Cause your opponent to spontaneously combust, dealing fire damage every turn for ten rounds. (Instant cast, long range, no cooldown, Fire) //A nice sustained damage ability

Arcane Barrage: Hurl an orb of arcane energy at your opponent, dealing a large amount of damage. (Instant cast, long range, 5 round cooldown, Arcane) //I’m toying with the idea of making this a cast-time spell which can be cancelled early to do less damage, with a small amount being done if it’s instant cast. I like casting as a mechanic and want more than two spells to use it.

Tier 4:

Ice Barrier: Encase yourself in a shield of ice, absorbing a large amount of damage. The ice will melt after thirty rounds if not already worn down. The caster can move and cast as normal while shielded (Instant cast, 20 round cooldown, Frost) //Careful tweaking of the cooldown and the amount absorbed will be key to balancing this ability both within its tier and the larger game. It might be fun to have fire spells break it down faster and/or frost spells build it up again, but that may well be too much. Similarly preventing/slowing movement while shielded could be interesting, but again, too much.

Cauterise: Cauterise your wounds, healing yourself for a medium amount and removing a harmful effect (Instant cast, 20 round cooldown, Fire) //Ah, but which debuff? Must we resort to the terrible solution of RNG or can we find a better way?

Alter Time: Rip the trousers of time, causing the caster to return to their current location, health, buffs and debuffs when cast a second time or after five rounds. The effect is negated if the caster dies before the effect occurs or the effect is dispelled. (Instant cast, doesn’t prevent other abilities being used, 40 round cooldown, Arcane) //Again, carefully controlling the cooldown and duration is important here. WoW’s Alter Time (which this is, of course) is one of the best mechanics they have. If used badly it can have disastrous effects, but using it cleverly is powerful to the point of imbalance. And using it well requires a really high level of anticipation, so that’s fine.

Tier 5:

Frostbite: When activated, causes your next chill effect to freeze the target in place for five rounds. (Instant cast, does not prevent other abilities being used, 15 round cooldown, Frost) //Makes getting Deep Freeze off a bit easier and allows for more control

Blazing Speed: Supresses movement slowing effects and increases your speed by 2 for two rounds. (Instant cast, does not prevent other abilities being used, 15 round cooldown, Fire)

//A useful escape or chasing tool

Presence of Mind: When activated, causes your next spell to be instant-cast. (Instant cast, does not prevent other abilities being used, 20 round cooldown, Arcane)

//My only problem with this is that there aren’t that many cast-time spells to choose from, but that’s not necessarily a problem

Tier 6:

Shatter (passive): All your spells deal double damage against frozen targets //And that’s why Deep Freeze is so powerful.

Ignite (passive): All your direct fire damage burns the target for half the damage again over 10 rounds

Arcane Power: Imbues the caster with arcane power, causing all abilities to deal 50% extra damage for 10 rounds (Instant cast, does not prevent other abilities from being used, 30 round cooldown, Arcane) //It’s pretty easy to work out the flat DPS increase from this one, and consequently should be easy enough to balance by tweaking the cooldown/duration/damage buff. It’s not as fun as ignite or shatter but having some simpler, active abilities is important.

Ok, so that’s all we have so far. The comments should give you a fairly good idea as to my thought processes, but I’d like to talk about a few points in detail.

First, it’s important to stress that this is really just a first draft. There are lots of changes pencilled in, some of which I’ve explained here, but lots of which need further play-testing to iron out. Second, I’m aware, of course, that this is a complete rip-off of WoW. I know. That’s the idea, kind of. My intention has always been to take the hotkey-based PvP of WoW and other MMOs and make it turn-based. I’ll do another whole post about that later, but for now assume that I know how awful I am for copying what were always rather derivative mechanics. In my defence, I’d refer back to my first point – this is far from complete – and also say that while all the classes I’m working with at the moment are to some degree influenced by WoW, the mage is the most faithful to the original (or at least how the original was in TBC/WotLK, Alter Time excluded). This is because in my view the mage is (was?) probably the best designed class in WoW in that period. There were balance issues of course, but the mechanics worked really well internally and the problems were imbalances in other classes and the game as a whole rather than the mage class. Maybe I should have started with another class and tried to hide the influences, but I’d rather be honest and say ‘yes, this is turn-based WoW. Kind of.’

Anyway. You may have noticed that there are even numbers of Fire, Frost and Arcane spells, with one of each in the talent tiers. I don’t want to force players into taking all Frost or all Fire or all Arcane talents, but there are some benefits to staying within a school. The downside of that is of course that doing so makes being locked out of that school both more likely and more dangerous. Getting locked out of Arcane is rather unlikely, which is deliberate – it’s the utility tier and is desperately needed for Blink and Counterspell so it’s something mages should have access to most of the time.

I’ve also tried to arrange it so that the tiers are themselves organised by theme – there are two damage increasing tiers (3 and 6), one heavy control (1), one defensive (4), and two control and escape tiers (2 and 5). There’s a little slippage between these, but in general this forces players to have a range of options open to them at all times – in short all combinations are viable, but some more so than others.

Well, this is already 2000 words, which is enough to try the most dedicated reader, so I’ll leave it there for now. Next time, counter-play, anti-fun, and balancing abilities with maths.

~Roxton.

Developer Diary: Week 1

2013-08-04T03:26:00.000-07:00

I had originally intended to give you the abilities and talents of one of the starting classes this week, but the original artwork that I wanted to provide with them has been delayed, so I'm postponing that till next week. If I haven't got the art by then I'll go ahead anyway. For now, though, you're stuck with my words; poor, monochrome substitutes for the glorious watercolours to come.

What I'm supposed to do here is talk about what I've done this week in the game, but doing so would be extremely dull as it's been mostly underlying engine tweaks and changes. There was one horrible moment when I realised that my entire approach to input-handling was wrong and thought I'd have to re-write from scratch, but after a pot of panic-coffee realised that I could fix it with three lines of code. So I did. But most of the time it's been very dull and sporadic because I've had to work rather hard on paying for the dull things like food and rent, and so I'd rather talk about mechanics and systems instead.

As this is the first post, let's talk about first principles. Originally I had a long list of these, but while I was writing them I realised that they were effectively all derived from two design ideals. So here they are.

1. Skill, not luck
I can understand, just about, why developers feel the need to include randomised elements in single-player content. If the player is performing a repetitive task, such as killing a large number of creatures, then random number generators (RNG) can provide a way to add mechanical diversity without having to actually make lots of new mechanics. Things like critical strikes and blocks and so on mean that players cannot perfectly predict what their actions, and the actions of their enemies, will do, and so have to play reactively to some degree - they can't just do the same things over and over again and get the same results. Similarly, randomly-occurring events, such as an ability having a chance to stun the enemy or give the player a buff, mean that the player has to stay on their toes to make the most of such opportunities.

That's all well and good, but in a multiplayer game it simply shouldn't be necessary. When I go up against another player, I automatically face the uncertainty that a basic, scripted computer creature has to introduce with RNG. Making an educated guess at what your opponent is going to do next is part of the skill of most games, and RNG destroys that because you simply just don't know if you're going to get unlucky with that 30% daze proc. And on the other side, it's extremely painful to be waiting for that daze that never comes.

I realise that many of the games that involve RNG of this nature often provide some way to modulate it by controlling player stats through gear and other abilities, but as this game is not stat- or loot-based I don't think it's relevant. Therefore, my aim will be this: I will not allow any element of chance to enter game mechanics unless doing otherwise would severely damage the mechanics.

2. Counter Play
In their episode on counter play, the Extra Credits team (drawing on ideas by Riot's Tom Cadwell) defined it as the principle that 'a mechanic or ability in a multiplayer game should increase the number of meaningful choices available to both the player using it and the player it's being used on'. This is a deceptively complex statement with which I do not entirely agree, and so I intend to give it a full examination in another post, or set of posts (I'd also like to cover the idea of 'fun v anti-fun'). For now, I think I'll simplify my interpretation of it into two statements:

I will not implement any un-counterable abilities.
Here I'm thinking of things like a WoW Paladin's bubble or a Hunter's deterrence - untouchable immunities (I know you can dispel bubble; that's not the point because hardly anyone can) - or things like a Monk's Touch of Karma where the opposing player's choices are effectively reduced to 'stand still and take it' or 'run away and take it from behind'. I'm aware that there are ways around all of these abilities, but I think people understand my point: actions which drastically reduce the target's number of meaningful choices for a significant period of time should simply not exist without an extremely good reason. And if that reason is balance related then your balance is broken already.

Having your meaningful choices significantly reduced should be a fail state.
By which I mean that if you're in a long-duration stun and can't get out, it's because you've played a long game of cooldown chess and lost, rather than it simply being part of the usual play. I'm thinking about things like forks in chess where you have to move your king because of check, but doing so means they can take one of your pieces with impunity. If you're in that situation it's because they've been clever or you've been stupid; the situation is unpleasant but it's your fault, not the game's. Losing control should not be taken lightly and should be a BIG DEAL rather than a standard occurrence.

Ok, I think that will do. The next update will be class mechanics, with or without artwork.

~Roxton.

Game Development Blog up

2013-07-25T04:35:00.004-07:00

The development blog for my new game, Fight to the Death (working title!) is up at www.fighttothedeathgame.blogspot.com. You can also reach it from the link in the bar above. As soon as I have slightly less negative money I'll start hosting it properly but for now this will do.

~Roxton.

A wild game appears

2013-07-15T05:49:00.001-07:00

I've been working - when I haven't been working on actual, paid work, or trawling medieval manuscripts for Arthuriana, or bothering the wildlife in the Outer Hebridees - on a new game, born from the ashes of my previous efforts. I'd like to properly document this, and so as soon as I've decided on a suitable name I'm going to start up a new blog specifically for that. This one, I think, will do for odds and ends such as the old Tribes guides and bits of code and reviews and so on, but I don't really want people to have to trawl through all of that. It's rather tempting to delete it all and start from scratch, but I can't quite bring myself to do it, so a new site it is. Vanity is like student politics - all the more intense when the stakes are lowest.

~Roxton.

Speech Recognition Macros 2: The Uploadening

2013-05-24T01:15:00.003-07:00

So over a year ago I uploaded a video demonstrating some macros I had written using the Windows Speech Recognition setup. Quite a few people have asked for the files, and my plan was originally to upload them once I'd finished polishing them. However, then my hard-drive died and I lost them all because apparently I'm too stupid to do proper backups. It's only now, with a double library paper unstarted with its deadline 5 days away, that I'm desperately procrastinating enough to start from scratch.

So, here are the files.

HOWEVER

There are a few caveats that you really ought to read.

These are not complete: some of the functionality shown in the video (though far from all of it) is missing because it required more complex code that I couldn't work out.

Case in point: I spent ages trying to remember how I'd made the paragraph selection work; it's not there except for some failed code.

Instructions on how to install the files and what the commands mean can be found here.

You're going to have to resign the macros for security purposes. Instructions on how can be found on the website linked above.

Open the macros using notepad or whatever your favourite text editor is and have a look at the files. If you see Click coordinates anywhere then you're going to have to change those to fit your screen (they were taken on an old 1024 monitor). I would do something cleverer but I just don't have the time right now, sorry. You can find your mouse coordinates using free software such as PointPos.
When I first wrote the macros I hadn't thought about it, but it occurs to me now that you could get much greater functionality by using something like AutoIt, compile the script it produces to a .exe and then call that using the WSR macros.
PLEASE DO READ THE FILES. These were written very quickly and while I have tested them on my machine you are going to have to work on them yourself. The code is pretty self-explanatory.

Maybe, when I finally get some free time again, I can sit down and write these out properly.

~Roxton.